By Richard Miniter, Pajamas Media Editor, Washington DC
"It may well be that some or even many of the males could have been combatants. It is not possible to judge the motives of the dead through surveys. We could record only what households told us." -- Gilbert Burnham

by

October 20, 2006 - 9:46 am

By estimating that there are some 655,000 “excess deaths” due to the Iraq war, Johns Hopkins University professor Gilbert Burnham touched off a firestorm of criticism across the blogosphere.

While opinions rocketed back and forth, no one tracked down the Lancet study’s principal author and asked about counter-arguments and methodological niggles. So I did.

THE INTERVIEW:

In the course of several cordial e-mail exchanges, I put a series a questions to Burnham based on the comments made by PJ Media readers, in the comments section of a recent article by Iraq the Model. Read carefully and see if you can find your own comment embedded in a question or two.

Most online objections fall into one of three categories: timing of publication (or motivation), methodology, and results. I asked him about the last two, in the course of reporting for another publication.

(I decided to ignore the first category, timing. While a lot of bloggers pointed out that Burnham’s study, published in the Lancet, a British medical journal, appeared just weeks before the 2006 congressional elections and that the Lancet had published a similar study just weeks before the 2004 presidential elections, I thought, so what? Anyone remotely clever schedules the publication of his work at a time when people might actually care enough to read it and discuss it. Besides, it is natural in an election year to consider the death toll in Iraq.)

PajamasMedia: Professor Burnham, below is a transcript of a CNN reporter questioning President Bush about your survey.

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN: A group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure and do you consider this a credible report?

PRESIDENT BUSH: No, I don’t consider it a credible report, neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died and it troubles me and grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to ? you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.

Do you have any thoughts or response to Bush’s answer?

Burnham: I agree with the President that we should all be concerned with the loss of human life in Iraq.

The primary motive in our work is to assess the human burden of the conflict on the people of Iraq, and use this information to promote measures to better protect civilians caught up in conflict–not just in Iraq but in the future wars which of the 21st century. The methods we used are standard methods used world wide; the US Government financially cluster sample surveys as a way of providing health and other information in many countries which are assisted by the USA.

PajamasMedia: The Iraqi government is also questioning your survey results. The Manchester (U.K.) Guardian reported:

The Iraqi government said the report’s death toll was “inflated” and “far from the truth”, but did not give its own figure for the deaths. An Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said in a statement that the toll in the report “exceeds the reality in an unreasonable way.”

Any thoughts on this?

Burnham: The numbers are large, and they surprised us . Yet it is only through population-based sampling that information such as the impact of conflict can be assessed. From isolated numbers taken from morgues and hospitals one can not arrive at a national figure. Not possible.

PajamasMedia: In 2004 the Lancet study found 100,000 excess deaths due to the war. By 2006, the number climbed to 655,000. In the past two years of conflict we see five times as many deaths as resulted from a period that included large-scale combat and massive air strikes. How do you account for the sharp increase?

Burnham: The news reports and reports from organizations which count bodies or accounts of deaths have already provided this information on the worsening violence. Sectarian violence is now a major problem which was only beginning in 2004.

PajamasMedia: In the Lancet article, you write: “Thus, the data presented here validates our 2004 study, which conservatively estimated an excess mortality of nearly 100,000 as of September 2004.” Does this mean you used the same procedure in 2006 that you did in 2004? Why do the results show a sharply higher death toll? Has there war gotten that much worse, or are there differences in methodology that make it difficult to compare the results of the two studies?

Burnham: We built on what we learned in the 2004 survey to design the 2006 survey. But in both surveys we started at 1 January 2002, thus giving us a chance this time to confirm the findings from 2004, though we visited none of the same neighborhoods in 2006. The methodology was the same, though we increased the sample size and the number of clusters [from 33 to 47]. The 2006 data from January 2002 through Sept 2004 (end of the 2004 study) were virtually identical to the 2004 studies. The death rates are rising, because the violence is getting worse.

PajamasMedia: The Lancet study uses a baseline mortality rate (the rate during Saddam years) of 5.5/1000 – almost half of the mortality rate of Europe. The mortality rate in the EU is 10.10/1000. Given Europe’s excellent health care, public health infrastructure and, lack of war in the past 60 years, how is it possible that Iraq’s baseline is half that of the EU? Are you simply relying on pre-war publications or was the baseline itself generated by interviews with random clusters?

Burnham: This was a ‘cohort’ study, which means we compared household deaths after the invasion with deaths before the invasion in the same households. The death rates for these comparison households was 5.5/1000/yr.

What we did find for the households as a pre-invasion death rate was essential the same number as we found in 2004, the same number as the CIA gives and the estimate for Iraq by the US Census Bureau.

Death rates are a function of many things–not just health of the population. One of the most important factors in the death rate is the number of elderly in the population. Iraq has few, and a death rate of 5.5/1000/yr in our calculation (5.3 for the CIA), the USA is 8 and Sweden is 11. This is an indication of how important the population structures are in determining death rates. (You might Google ‘population pyramid’ and look at the census bureau site–fascinating stuff.)

PajamasMedia: During the same period, Iraq is at war with Iran and itself. Public-health infrastructure was poor, although perhaps not as poor as today. Does it seem plausible to you that the baseline (or pre-war) mortality rate is accurate?

Burnham: Yes as above. Yes as being the right number, and Yes as what we need it for–comparisons in the same households before the war.

PajamasMedia: The Lancet Study comes up with a post-war mortality rate almost double that Saddam’s Iraq. In fact, it is roughly equivalent to the mortality rate in Hungary is 13/1000. Does that rate seem plausible, given Hungary’s superior infrastructure and almost 50 continous years of peace? Is it possible that both the pre- and post-war mortality rates are too low? Why not?

Burnham: There are many old people in Hungary , 40% are over age 55 vs. 9.3% in Iraq over 55. That’s the difference.

PajamasMedia: You conducted interviews in 47 clusters, 12 of them were in Baghdad, 2 were in Basra, and 3 were in Anbar. Approximately 25% of the estimate comes from Baghdad (only 21% of the population in Baghdad). This seems disproportionate. Is it possible that you over-sampled “hot zones” relative to population?

Burnham: We used the 2004 UNDP/MoP estimates for governorates. We divided the total population by the number of clusters, and then moved on a systematic way through the population assigning clusters proportionate to the population numbers we were using.

Obviously a cluster near the “edge” could fall either in or out of a governate. As we could not split clusters to be 1/2 in one governorate and 1/2 in another, it might look like there was an intentional oversampling. In the end we are satisfied by the representativeness of the sample.

Baghdad, by the way, was not the most violent area, being in an area of mid-level death rates. There are always chances that sampling was done in more hot spots, but there is an equal chance that, with a natural human tendancy to self-preservation might cause sampling to be the other way to unconsciously sample in cool spots where one might be safer.

PajamasMedia: All of their interviews came from populated areas where they could interview people (so word-of-mouth of their purpose would help keep the interviewers safe), but also where the violence is concentrated. Would overlooking rural areas create a bias? Or have you controlled for that factor in some way?

Burnham: We sampled from all administrative units selected. Using the standard nearest-front-door approach, the teams would not likely select isolated homesteads which were many miles away from the area being sampled.

PajamasMedia: One of your findings in the Lancet article: “Across Iraq, deaths and injuries from violent causes were concentrated in adolescent to middle age men.” That is, males of combat age. Does this suggest that collateral damage is unlikely to be the cause of death?

Burnham: It may will be that some or even many of the males could have been combatants. It is not possible to judge the motives of the dead through surveys. We could record only what households told us.

PajamasMedia: You write that an active survey is more accurate than a “passive” system of counting media reports, morgue reports or other lists of the dead, which are often grossly incomplete in a war zone. This seems reasonable. To make sure people weren’t making things up, you teams received death certificates some 80% of the time. Also reasonable. So why are the active death figures an order of magnitude higher than the passive counts?

Burnham: The difference depends on the proportion of the the passive-reporting facilities whose reports on death tolls reach some central tabulating body. Our information is that not many facilities are reporting, and what is being reported is often being manipulated.

PajamasMedia: According to this report 14% of the 655,000 people died as a result of suicide bombers, which would be about 91,700 people. This is far greater than the media estimates and suicide attacks tend to be well-reported, as opposed to shooting or roadside bombings. Do you have any specific information about where these 97,000 people were killed?

Burnham: We did not report on suicide bombers.

PajamasMedia: Your study attributes a third or more than 200,000 would have died in air raids. That is more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. And air raids have basically ceased in cities since 2003. Is it possible that your teams are counting something else aside from aerial bombardment in this category? If so, what would that be? Could it be a translation error?

Burnham: Overall, 13% of deaths were attributed to airstrikes, not 200,000. We reported what households said; the data were recorded in English, as all interviewers spoke English.

PajamasMedia: Historical comparisons might be helpful here. 650,000 violent deaths is about 150,000 more than the number of soldiers who died (violently and by disease) during the American Civil War, a conflict which involved a population larger than Iraq’s, and lasted a year than the current conflict has been going on. There is nothing in Iraq that looks like Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, etc. What makes you believe that Iraq is deadlier than the American Civil War?

Burnham: What we are reporting is cumulative deaths over a 40 month period throughout an area of 26.1 million, not a 1-2 day battle field event.

PajamasMedia: Perhaps those interviewed related the number of deaths per extended family (and not “household”). If the researchers interviewed members of the same extended family (but who were not in the same household), then they might have double-counted. EXAMPLE: If I lost someone in my family on 9-11, but not in my household and a researcher asked me if I lost a family member on 9-11, I would answer yes – as would members of several households. All for the same solitary death. Aside from death certificates, how did you control for over-counting?

Burnham: The death had to be of someone eating and sleeping in the selected household (our definition of a household) for 3 months before the death, in order to be included. We reviewed each cluster and each written death entry individually. We are satisfied that there was no double counting.
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256 Comments, 256 Threads

1.
Jim

If you divide 655,000 by 40 months this works out to 16,375 per month. This is a huge number! Any country that loses 16,375 people a month would have some awareness from Red Cross, Human Rights,etc., any of dozens of very liberal oriented organizations. Where have they been? The US hasn’t kept those organizations out and yet none of them have reported this huge number of deaths per month.
So ok maybe the deaths didn’t take place in a linear fashion i.e. might have been 40,000 in Mar03, 60,000, some month, but again… why didn’t we hear about those huge numbers then?
I think that statistically sampling of 25% of “hot zones” and from a group of people who are in all likelihood as most people do, make things larger and more dire than it really is. For example, ask the average person, how many people die in car accidents in the US… do you think they would no that over 40,000 people are killed in the US? Nope they would estimate a lot higher.
So, I find this estimate what it is intended to do is nothing but help the gangsters in Iraq.

Just as we all thought – the guy gets the numbers he wants and the contradictions and inconsistencies that are pointed out, he just ignores. Just as in 2004, he’s attempting to manipulate the public’s perception and swing the election.

I think it’s time we start to consider charging types of people such as this with sedition. (and no, I am not joking)

This report is skewed by faulty data collection and yet the professor continues to believe in its authenticity. Common sense does not enter into this report at all. If all of the pertinent questions were asked in English then I would assume translaters were used so how sure are we about the translations? Also does anyone believe that the MSM would not be reporting this higher death rate from dawn to dusk every day they sure do nto report the good news. Also the timing and release of this report is political and it was meant to have an impact on the election.

I like how Mr. Miniter strategically painted this ‘yellow-red’ in a corner through incisive questioning. Clearly, the good professor Burnham is full of Shiloh. Though we haven’t had air raids in Iraq for years, maybe the leaders at John Hopkins can do an office raid on this nutty professor for extermination purposes in order to preserve any vestige of integrity that may be left of this once great university- followed up by a sanitation crew with a lot of disinfectant.

This truly shows the amount of ridiculous claims professors seem to make. It is unfortunate that a few “bad apples” reflect on the teaching profession so much. Things like “No Child Left Behind” have put requirements on teachers that teachers in the past did not have to go through. I will be waiting with baited breath as to how much doubling, and tripling the requirements on teachers (and yet giving them no pay raises in districts such as LAUSD, one of the largest school districts in the nation) is improving student scores.
It flies in the face of reason that these professors can be at such levels of education. I bet if you were in this “professor’s” class he would fail you if you disagreed with his mentally inept findings and did not agree with his political opinions.

Note that Burnham treats the Civil War question as if the figures were for a single battle rather than the entire conflict, and how he bats away the suicide bomber question without so much as attempting to explain why it was mistaken.

Since there were a good number of satellite and other recon photographs taken of Iraq in the last 20 years, chances are there are a number of Iraqi cemetaries have been repeatedly imaged. It would be interesting to examine these and see of the putative increase in deaths is borne out by burials. (Come to think of it, it would be interesting to examine burial records at the cemetaries themselves. Chances are at least some of them are reasonably comprehensive.)

One way of tracking enemy casualties is to monitor burials from the air; there is nothing new in this. It’s an obvious technique to use to check on the accuracy (and honesty) of Bumham’s work.

Too bad you didn’t have the chance to ask him about the injured. The liberal folks at Iraq Body Count in their fisking of this study point out a number of issues, one of which being the utter lack of masses of wounded.

And, as others have pointed out, since the Lancet group verified 90% of their interview numbers with death certificates, why not just count death certificates and myultiply by 1.1?

If 80% of the people supplied death certificates, why wouldn’t the government be aware of these deaths? It doesn’t seem credible their sample had an 80% return rate on death certificates, but for the population as a whole certificates are only issued to a much smaller fraction.

In other words, if Iraqis are getting death certificates at an 80% rate, why aren’t the “official” number much higher?

Also, he is wrong on the Civil War. People weren’t just dying on the battlefield in a day or 2. Because of the terrible problem of disease, roughly 2/3 of all deaths were from disease. It doesn’t seem plausible that Iraq is seeing numbers at a greater rate than that AND that rate isn’t being noticed by the UN and international media.

This is clearly a case of logic and common sense being thrown out the window. According to this ridiculous survey an average of 16,500 “excess” deaths have occured in Iraq for 40 months. Let’s use a little common sense here. That is more casualities than the American civil war. This is double the deaths that occured in Somalia during the early 90′s. That caused a huge outrage and UN resolutions. If this is truly happening in Iraq, then why haven’t we heard any outrage from humanitarian groups. Even the best spin doctors from any administration couldn’t hide such a large number of deaths. It just doesn’t make sense. This number, 655,000, is just a number pulled out of thin air. It is as worthless as the paper it is written on and as ludicrous as the authors of the “survey”.

In the above article the number of death’s since Sept. 2004 is 550,000.

Over a two year period it would come to about 277,500 excessive deaths per year, or 23,125 excessive deaths per month or 771 excessive deaths per day.

And nobody notice this until these guys did a survey? Yea…Sure… that’s the ticket!

In my local, morning news cast there is always a segment on how many reportedly died in Iraq the previous day due to conflict with the miitary, IDE’s or small arms fire and the like. The number is always something like 5 or 10, and on a really bad day it gets up to 25.

A simple comparison to WWII will show the nonsense of this report. In the four years of violent, full-on war with our enemy forces in WWII, the USA lost less lives than the number of Iraqi lives that are being reported killed in the last two years in Iraq.

To continue to defend this survey and its numbers, the authors must be stuck on stupid.

the reporting of 650,000 deaths is not a political statement. Are you saying that this is even politically motivated? that is insane. a number like that is so horrible, that it should bother all those who hear it, not “swing voters” how off could a translation be? is that the common sense? that translators can’t translate? don’t be ridiculous.

i ask you to go and ask people (average education of an american is 8th grade)”how many people do you think die in car accidents each year?” please tell me if they guess a number higher than 44,000, because that shocked me, and should bother you.

furthemore, americans have not heard of these numbers and statistics of deaths in Iraq because they either don’t pay attention and/or they follow mainstream media, which will report only what will make viewers watch them so they make advertising dollars.

Finally, charging someone like this with sedition? if you are not joking, you are ignorant. the numbers he wants? does anyone go and say “i want to make up a study saying 650,000 people have died” even if someone did, for what purpose i could never understand, that is not grounds for sedition. changing public opinion is not sedition, it is a fight against oppresion and power-hunger and genocide. if bringing up a statistic not benefitial to the republican congress is sedition, you might wind up sliding down the slippery slope to tyranny.

I too think this study is somewhat inflated; however I don’t think the “official” counts are accurate either. The fact that some 80% of the survey is actually accounted for and verified via death certificates lends at least some credibility to the study.

If we assume that there are in fact 16,000+ deaths per month, and we further assume that Iraq has a land area of some 160,000+ square miles, and if we assume that most of the population lives in only 1% of that land area we are left with only about 10 deaths per month per square mile (of inhabited area).

With those assumptions you’re also looking at a population density of approximatly: 14,000 per square mile.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know everyone within a square mile of me and I wouldn’t even notice if 10 of them died, or even if 400/14,000 of them died within the last 40 months.

When you look at the numbers like that, I don’t think it’s reasonable to think that even if this study is accurate that “liberal” aid agncies and the like would be all over this.

Don’t just ignore the hungary example. Countries with no wars can have mortality rates as high as indicated by this study and nobody blinks an eye.

Know what the beauty of the Lancet study is? They use a proven, established medical polling methodology used for tracking diseases. They follow that methodology flawlessly. However, they use a very small number of cluster points so that it would be virtually impossible to reproduce or even check the study against any verifiable data. They use a sample that is mostly self chosen rather than random. They publish an 8 page, 8 page! document with no raw data to allow anyone to even try to check their sample. They push for an accelerated peer review so it can be released before November. And Presto! A study that can’t be proven wrong or right. A study that claims a remarkable result without providing a remarkable argument. A study that provides the simple minded a rallying cry of 600,000 dead!

Interesting, I have not seen one truly scientific statistical argument against this study. Moreover, the 2004 numbers confirmed in 2006. The numbers before the war compare with CIA numbers and you guys still say it is not a good study. What else do you need? And this method is used all over the place. Wow, there is just nothing that would show you that this war was a pretty bad idea. Hopeless…

These numbers make sense if you count the hundreds of thousands of (saddam killed) bodies discovered in mass graves and identified since the war. I’m sure prior to 2003, they were considered ‘missing’ by their families. Now, after identification, the next of kin are notified that they are indeed ‘dead’. How were the samples asked about the dead? “Were you notified this year that a relative was dead?” or “Did a relative die this year?”. Similar questions, but vastly different results depending on the format of the question and/or translation.

About the garbage Lancet study two years ago just before the last election, which every msm repeated the 100,000 figure but no one corrected after this site pointed out how wrong it could be (as low as about 6,500 deaths with the same confidence level):

80% of the deaths were verified by death certificates…that makes 524,000 slips of paper produced to support the claims. At least they weren’t electronic death certificates from Diebold. Should be easy enough to double-check the paper trail.

While I think of it, I wonder who’se writing all these death certificates? Perhaps some enterprising Iraqi ran down to Kinkos and cranked off an extra 500,000 certificates, randomly generated names, and filled in the blanks just to make the US look bad in a study that people would call statistically invalid anyway.

Well the fools and knaves who supported and still support this evil war, based on lies, of course are furious to have a competent authority tell the truth about it. There was lots of denial re what we did in Vietnam too, until our war there fell apart and the info trickled in. We killed way more there than in Iraq, but I will have to look up the now established figure. The USA is a murderous nation. Face it, Bushdupes.

McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam war, estimated after, when he had repented, that about 3.2 million Vietnamese had been killed in the war. So the Iraq number is much less, but still those in denial can’t take the facts.

Nutty Professor?? No, todays’ typical professor and typical judge for that matter. Obviously these numbers are bogus and for one major reason, where are all the bodies?? and who is burying or disposing of over 540 bodies a day??

Leave it to a liberal to try to scare around election time only to embarass themselves.

Unfortunately you failed to ask the most obvious question: In their 2004 study with the same methodology they found over 200.000 killed in Falujah alone. This was obviously too large, so they just removed the Falujah cluster. But the researchers did no attempt what so ever to explain what bias gave rise to this absurd figure, and used the same method to get the 655.000 figure.

To me this is clearly unscientific. If their method worked, why would you get 200.000 dead in Falujah? Since they seem to believe in their study, do they actually believe half of the city was killed, without anyone noticing? Why don’t they offer a reasonable explanation of the bias? The most likely explanation of the 655.000 figure is that the same bias is in place, absurdly inflating the deaths.

By the way I am hardly convinced by the answer to several of the questions.

1. “What makes you believe that Iraq is deadlier than the American Civil War?

Burnham: What we are reporting is cumulative deaths over a 40 month period throughout an area of 26.1 million, not a 1-2 day battle field event.”

The civil war was fought over 4 years, and in area with a 32+ million population.

2. “Do you have any specific information about where these 97,000 people were killed?

Burnham: We did not report on suicide bombers”

They sample 300 violent death postinvasion, of whom 38 died from car bombs and 42 “Other explosion/ordnance”. This makes for 27% of the 601 000 violent deaths reported by the study, that is 160.000 killed in explosions (655.000 includes more non-violent deaths as well).

Regardless if the car bombs and explosions were “suicide” bombings or not 160.000 is 10-20 times more than all reported killed in bombings (Brookings Iraq index has a figure of 8300).

This translates to about 130 civilian Iraqis killed every day by explosions EVERY DAY since the war began! Given that the arab and western media gives a lot of attention to these bombings, how do we explain that we miss almost all of these bombs? Which is more likely, that the study is flawed, or that 90-95% of massive car bombs/explosions simply go unnoticed?

Instead of answering the question Burnham doges it on a linguistic technicality, because they don’t report on “suicide” bombings, just bombings.

3. It is true that in this study they “only” report 80,000 killed by airs strikes (more than those killed directly in Nagasaki). This still does not answer the question of how we get so many killed by airs bombings, largely AFTER civilian bombings stopped.

This “scientific” estimate of Iraqis killed from air strikes is twice that of those killed during the Blitz, where the reinforce of Nazi Germany was intentionally trying to kill as many people as possible. No attempt is made to explain the bias, expect noting that the people speak English.

Whatever bias is driving the Falujah deaths to 200.000 is probably driving the rest of the study.

Now that I see that Victor Hansen, a soi-disant expert on Ancient History, is a member of Pajamas Media, I begin to get a better idea where all the warmongers and Neocons come from. Too bad Hansen is at a very mediocre college. It tends to diminish his stature. But his ideas do that already, so…….

Oh, ye of little faith….amazing how everyone is an expert! Whether you think it is 600,000 or 100,000, it is a massive amount of death and sufferring to inflict on innocent people……you SHOULD feel bad about it, and I surely hope that you do.

The lesson to be learned is that pinpoint accuracy and GPS does not make war “clean” as the government and media want you to think. In the end, it is still about death – of mostly innocents.

Most of the criticisms of this study seem to go something like “the information I just heard cannot possibly be true, because if it was, I would have heard something about it”. This seems like a kind of strange argument.

Hmm, so 218,000 deaths per year. Iraq has a population of 26,000,000. So if birthrates of 3% are maintained and correlate with a 3% growth rates in the amount of deaths. The assumption could be made that the last Iraqi should be killed off by 2125.

I’m be facetious but its as valid of assertion of as the orignal figures in Professor Burnham’s study.

Can I see a show of hands from the “enlightened” commentators, those who have been in Iraq? Or even outside of the country? Ever?

Right.

80% of 650k had death certificates = 520k.

I won’t even bother beginning to address the skeptic “patriots” numerous, erroneous statements, claims, opinions, and other “facts”.

Suffice it to say they also would have pleaded that they were just doing their job in select camps in Germany during the 30′s and 40′s, too. Too bad the 650k loss of life wasn’t some of the deadwood in America. We wouldn’t have had the “59m” stupid people to supposedly vote for the idiot administration the world has had to suffer through for the past few years.

The English watch Baywatch and consider themselves experts on foreign policy. They hate Muslims and everyone in Europe and then like to blame America. Why do we ally ourselves with them? It is no secret that we don’t need their pathetic help. They just want to be included. Take your Land Rovers and go home.

If 650,000 people died in 40 months, where are all the bodies? Saddam couldn’t even dispose of a few hundred bodies without the world knowing. Let alone the American resources to covertly dispose of 650,000 bodies. People talk, the bulldozer driver or the backhoe opertor would be talking to somebody in the media. Show me 650,000 dead people, then I’ll believe this nut job. In the mean time, I think he is late for his “I hate Amercica” rally.

The WSJ made an even more telling point than the genral under-sampling. The researchers apparently did not record the age or gender of their respondents. this is important because it allows one to check how representative the sample was of the general population. The smaller the sampling ratio the more important it is to check its representativeness. It is extremely odd that this data is not available.

One final comment. The age pyramid clearly has significant implications on mortality rates. However, if this is the case then it seems to me you have to break your mortality rates down by age cohort to actually come up with the calculation.

In addition, like to like comparisons would include death rate comparisons with Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran. A robust reports would have footnoted these.

I find some of Professor Burnham’s responses to the translation issues interesting. He said, “…the data were recorded in English, as all interviewers spoke English.” I teach English as a Second Language and train others to do so. Those of us in this particular field understand all too well that those who “speak” English have varying degrees of ability and proficiency. Further, any translators coming from a mid-Eastern culture, such as Iraq, will do more to save face than to admit they do not understand how to accurately translate a response. Frequently when I have used translators, I have been informed by one who is more proficient in the language than the one translating for me that my translator had either grossly understated what I said or grossly exaggerated what I had said or had gotten it so wrong that the laughter in the room, which I did not udnerstand, was caused by a completely inaccurate translation.
It seems Professor Burnham is either unable or unwilling to admit that one of his concerns in planning his study should have been to design a test for his translators that would have allowed him to defend his work rather than dismiss the importance of the translation as a non-issue.

Most of the fighting is limited to three or four provinces in Iraq. Having said that, I’m to believe that 700 plus people per day, 7 days a week, are being killed in mainly those areas. I would imagine post invasion that the worst day or days, maybe that many civilians could have been killed across all of Iraq. But to keep that up for years, seven days per week?

Not a chance in hell.

I also can’t believe that nobody ever questioned the truthfulness of the Iraqis. It’ been shown time and again that they lie about everything and I’m certainly not going to start believing them on this one.

Johns Hopkins is a great hospital- my wife had a heart and kidney transplant there and we have nothing but the most respect for this institution. HOWEVER, ALL THE FORMAL HOPKINS ENTITIES ARE MARYLAND LOCATED WITH BALTIMORE SATURATED LIBERAL BIAS. IF YOU BELIEVE THAT 16,00 PLUS IRAQ CIVILIANS HAVE ON AVERAGE BEEN KILLED SINCE THE START OF THIS NECESSARY WAR, THEN I BELIEVE YOU ARE ALSO IN THE SAME GROUP OF FOOLS THAT SWEAR GEORGE BUSH AND THE US GOVERMENT PLANNED AND EXECUTED THE 9/11 ATTACKS.

PROFESSOR BURNHAM IS A BIASED POLTROON WITH NO SOUND BASIS FOR HIS WORTHLESS PROPAGANDA.

Gilbert Burnham is left wing tenured socicalist that laughingly refers to himself as a professor.The stupid moron could not run a hot-dog stand in yankee stadium in the middle of the world series, The only reason that he is not starving to death right now is tenure.

3/03-5/06 is 38 months 655,000 devided by 38= 17,236/month.If he can send one of his crack teams out and and document a third of that number of deaths in any single month in the Iraqi war, I will give him two weeks to draw a crowd and kiss his stupid ass on the steps of the UN. Mr. Burnham stated on national TV that 92% of the famlies that he interviewed had death certificates, That begs another question, why not count death certificates? William Welch is got to be turning over in his grave because of the junk BS (bad socielogy)comming out of his beloved creation, Johns Hopkins University

Remember the years before the war, when those who were opposed to the sanctions on Iraq would constantly claim that sanctions were killing one million Iraqi babies each year, and blame the U.S. for those deaths? (That sure is one statistic not cited by ANYONE since the war began, especially since those who were citing it would have to admit that the war had saved millions of Iraqi babies.) Well, 655,000 deaths over five years would seem a vast improvement.

The U.S. will lose regardless of what happens. The only thing you have to do to beat the U.S. in any conflict is show their citizens a picture of one (1) dead American soldier and they lose their will. They do not fight, they police. A foe who will not fight back, regardless of strength, is a conquered foe. Not to mention the greatest terrorist weapon, the Unites States media. They reject their leadership regardless of who is in power.

What I wonder is why, after The Lancet’s story on this study was splashed across front pages, headlined on the BBC and NPR, and otherwise given an unquestioned free run by the mainstream media for about two news cycles, why, I ask, are all of these good questions being pursued only in the media backwaters of a weblog? Other than the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, has any paper of note, or any broadcast network said, “We need to do some real journalism with regard to the JHU study. We need to ask some hard questions so our readers/viewers/listeners can understand these sensational claims.”

The recent problems in journalism have little to do with the stories that journalists have done. It is the non-stories that they have fumbled so badly; Rathergate, Plamegate, Foleygate… And let’s not forget the protests over a Dubai-based corporation from owning an interest in U.S. ports management in the name of “port security”, and yet allow dock workers with felony records to work there to satisfy union interests.

There have been dozens of estimates about war dead in Iraq. This one is far and away higher than all the rest, and when people show that it is faulty, the nutjobs cry about “an illegal war”. After you define what an “illegal war” is, please explain why you anti-war types don’t defend the results of the other surveys? Who is picking sides – those who find fault with a completely lopsided count, or those who believe it?

In order to verify all 655,000 claimed deaths, if they worked around the clock every day for two years they would need to verify 1.8 deaths per minute. It sounds like their study team must have had hundreds of people involved in the verification, or perchance the whole study is BOGUS. Naw, they wouldn’t do something like that…

80% of respondets showed death certificates according to this interview. There were 1,849 Iraqi households questioned. It was easy to play with numbers by choosing clusters promising higher death toll. 80% is an average number. Mr. Obvious and other lefties need to realize that 80% does not mean 574,000 pieces of paper. Where the he11 do you guys get your education? Dennis is right-this country lost all of its common sense.

The professor questions the manipulation of reporting data by some, but seems to believe the data he encounters otherwise, based on a percentage of death certificates. This is curious. If I came up with this data, I would question immediately the data I obtained, rather than speculate that someone else’s data has been manipulated.
I believe he should continue to collect data. At this rate, half of the population will expire in the next decade, as all of the younger men are eliminated, no children are born, and the elderly expire. Just where are those mass graves?
These data always detract from issues which are more important than numbers, such as exactly who is killing whom and why. The American policy is not stoking the flame of sectarian violence- insurgents are who want this mission to fail. And there is nothing un-American about a Shiite and a Sunni deciding that starting tomorrow they will not kill each other. In fact, it is downright typical of western culture.

Knowing what I know now, even after all the biased media reports, I would still support the Iraq invasion.

The goal in Iraq is to spread freedom and Democracy. With freedom and democracy in the heart of the Arab world, you have a great chance that it will effect its neighbors (Already has started to in Iran and Egypt)

Look at what happened to the Soviet Union when they got a taste of Freedom and Democracy as well as other parts of the world. When Iraq is turned into a Free society then you will see a transformation in the Middle East like has never before been realized.

I dislike Bush’s domestic policy with the spending, however this foreign policy is not only the only hope for the Middle East as a whole, but visionary and will change the world as we know it.

The Middle East has always had strife and war long before the US declared it’s independance. This one single event could end thousands of years of slaughter, oppression and tyranny.

The Islamic extremists and the media know this too, thats why they are fighting so hard to stop it.

1- if you accept the mean number of deaths from the 2004 lancet article than >26,000 per month have died since then. This sounds a bit over the top!
2- i would think that the death rate in the kurdish areas would be less than in the sunni areas;
3- i have been in contact with a scientist in basrah since 1992; my impression from his emails are that in iraqs 2nd largest city many of the deaths are TARGETTED ASSASSINATIONS– not the multiple deaths we see in the midddle of Iraq.
4- if the kurdish and basrah areas are experiencing less deaths than the sunni areas than deaths in sunni areas since 2004 should vastly exceed 26,000 per month. This really sounds unreasonable to me!!!

It is interesting that the same data collection methods that the US government uses are thought to be seditious when the results don’t agree with the conservative mindset. The range quoted in the article is huge, but even at the lowest far exceeds the “official” figures. Besides, anyone who needs these figures to realize that the situation in Iraq is fubar is living in some alternative reality.

Having read to the bottom of this list, I have not yet seen a substantive stastistical rebuttal. This was an excellent interview by PJM and the statistical methods used are quite standard. The answers were straightforward and focused on methodology.

The important point for skeptics is that only a portion of the deaths reported in this survey are directly attributable to coalition forces. Side-stepping the question of what figure would be acceptable here, what this data is pointing to is an upsurge of unexpected deaths caused by civil unrest.

The figures are not out of the ballpark given the number of deaths reported in the English language media. For every death reported in the news there are many more which go uncovered. We obviously have a powderkeg on our hands and should be focusing more effort on minimizing civilian casualties and restoring civil order. So how?

Elephant man (I think) asked about the Moore article in the WSJ. I responded to that but it was not published, hopefully because it was too technical.

Net result, regardless of the sampling frame which i would not accept from a 1st year grad student, is the lack of release of the full questionnaire, and the fault of not collecting age & sex (minimally) of the respondents.

Collection of serious “disaster” data requires, at a minimum:

Who lived here before X happened?
Who lives here now?
Where are the people before X and now?

These questions must be asked of the senior household head, not just “somebody” who happens to be available. That is why the age and sex of the informant (respondent) is so important.

In addition, the “cluster sampling” method has been severely abused by this charlatan. Cluster Samples (I’m not sure who originally designed them), are only indicated when one wants to look at “incidence” of some variable. Clustering is NOT a Time 1 – Time 2 system (which measures change on THE SAME VARIABLE over time).

The simple extrapolation of data from the Sadamm(Iraqi) census till today is simply beyond any demographic methodology, which takes into account changes in environment, policies and…as a matter of fact, cannot account for war.

Political? i can’t tell, and couldn’t care less.

From a methodological point of view the man is a dunce and charlatan. He also claims that the Appendices are the product of his “grad students”.

My opinions about Iraq are: it was a mistake, we (the US screwed up and gotta have a way out), BUT bullshit data have no role in policy decisions.

Sampling ANYTHING, during a war is a futile activity. Having worked in survey samples all over the world, I would NOT have accepted this contract. There are NO statistical parameters upon which to base change.

Better this (no – name dipper from Hopkins) pay attention to the basics of methodology).

if you use the number of births reported in the Lancet paper, you will get a birth rate that is around 20 births/1000/year. the cia world factbook reports a slow but steady decline in the iraqi birthrate, ongoing from before the war. for 2005, it was around 32 births/1000/year.

i would imagine that collecting birth information from iraqi hospitals would be more reliable than a ‘survey’.

if the survey can’t reproduce the birth rate from other sources, then the sample does not represent the population.

otherwise, you liberals can always argue that no Iraqi’s were born in the last year, which would explain the huge drop in the birth rate over the past 5.5 year.

If you get sick don’t go to Johns Hopkins. The study used only a 15 month period to test the deaths before the invasion and a 39 month period after the invasion. The sample periods must be the same length and I don’t care what kind of a professor you are. The study showed only 2 violent deaths in the 15 months out of a total population of 13,000 before the invasion with no women & children dying. Do you really believe that? It showed 300 violent deaths after the invasion. Thus 655,000 was extrapolated from a count of 300. If you belive this I have a bridge on the market. Finally they used the “nearest front door” sampling approach. So if a car bomb went off in front of a concentrated area of the city and blew-up four househoulds it counts just as much as the same number of households in the county. GIVE ME A BREAK!!!!!! He said it wouldn’t be practical to walk miles to get an accurate sample. Very scientific, huh?. The only problem with this study is that all the radio hosts on Airhead America are supporting it and their idiot listeners will believe it just like 70% of their listeners believe George Bush planned the attacks on the WTC 9/11/01.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

and Quote:

Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.

so that would mean that 69 percent of those deaths have been moslems killed by moslems with guns and car bombs.

so that means that 414,000 of those deaths were moslems murdered by the chosen of allah.

so, for each moslem killed by an infidel, some moslem kills Two More moslems.

and for each article published and spun there are thousands who have passionately uninformed opinions.

How will historians figure out what the hell was going on during the information age? There are so many sources with so little credibility that it’s going to be virtually impossible to do a realistic case study on anything. This comes across as a numbers game before an election imho.

There were 1,849 interviews recorded for the study. Supposedly 80% of those had death certificates to back them up (47 clusters, about 40 interviews each cluster). The 650k number is extrapolated from those to represent all of Iraq.

Extrapolate: infer unknown values from trends in the known data.

Does anyone know how many deaths by natural causes, accidents or non-terrorist murder were recorded by the study in addition to those attributed to war?

look, 600,000 is awfully high, and the guy himself admits it’s a survey- meaning the results are prone to all sorts of issues.

but what i find interesting is that 90% of the comments here seize on the fact that the number probably isn’t quite that high not to say “but there’s still a big problem here”, but instead to suggest we try this guy for treason???

look, everyone sees the reports of 200+ dead per day. even if the number is 1/3rd of what he says- 200,000- does that mean things are hunky dory? there have been 440 murders in nyc this year- there have been that many in iraq in the last four days.

i’m a dem (fire away), but i’m no liberal pu**y and i’m no cut-and-runner. i want one of two things- either us completely out to let them destroy themselves, or us to go in PROPER with 400,000 troops and bring the hammer down. if we don’t do one or the other, this is only going to keep going exactly as it is.

The numbers are shocking, and probably inflated. 80% are backed up by death certificates, though. And yes, the timing is very, very suspicious. But the fact is that there are tens of thousands of dead Iraqis who would not be dead if the U.S. had not invaded. And Iraq did not attack the US on 9/11. No link exists between Iraq and Al Qaeda… But this is important. Foreign media have reported that the US has dropped over 1,700 tons of depleted uranium on Iraq, which is radioactive for at least 4 billion years. The Iraqis are seeing terrible, unusual cancers as a direct result of the weapons the US is using there. Maybe the professor counted some of those cancer deaths in his study….I don’t know why people say you have to be 1. pro war or 2. cut and run. That’s simplistic and intellectually dishonest. There are a lot of other options for getting us out of the mess we have created in Iraq, and just because President Bush has mentioned only those two, repeatedly, doesn’t mean we all have to shut off our brains. And just because a professor reports something that threatens our world view, it doesn’t mean that we have to dismiss him or his work without considering the possibility that he is more correct in his findings than any of us would like to admit. Pay attention to info which makes you uncomfortable; you might learn something from it.

His figures represent “excessive” deaths. Not deaths from IEDs, not deaths from suicide bombings, not deaths from air raids.

The numbers represent all that and more. It includes people who have died of disease, people who’ve tripped and broken their necks, Iraqis who have died of preventable medical conditions, etc etc etc.

Saddam may have killed a lot of his own people, but there was a basic infrastructure. The U.S. swept in and blew that all to hell. Now Iraq is a freakin’ war zone. Why are you all so shocked that more people are dying than ‘normal’?

According to the study, the actual figures are 650,000 +/- 300,000

The statistics provide a 95% confidence level that the “true” death toll is somewhere between ~300,000 and ~900,000 dead. 300k is just as likely as 650k, which is also as likely as 900k.

Just because y’all don’t know statistics doesn’t mean the prof is wrong. Someone with an open mind would evaluate the numbers for what they are, not for what you think they’re saying.

The study used standard epidemiologic methods. The relationship of the rates it found to rates found in “passive” surveys (for example Iraq Body Count) is similar to what is usually reported in the epidemiologic literature.

It’s absurd to declare either belief or disbelief in the study results. You never trust just one study. Reasonable conclusions would be: (1) there’s no obvious big error in the study, and (2) the study needs to be replicated.

I will stay out of the statistics argument. The number of dead Iraqi males of military age is a number that should be as high as possible. What annoys me is references to ‘an illegal war’ without reference to the specific statute that the war violates. If the war in Iraq is illegal, take it to court.

If the Iraqis were dying at a rate of 5.5/1000 per year and assuming that the size of the population remained constant, you can see that some in that population (at least 5.5) would live to be 182 years old and 11 to be 181 and 16.5 to 180 etc.

Half the population could expect to live beyond 91 years of age, I don’t think so.

What this means is that the figure is either invalid, if the age groups within the population are homogenous or that the population contains clumps of people at various ages.

If you look at the population of the US the baby boomers are entering their sixties and by the end of the decade the death rate from natural causes is going to jump dramatically, because the boomers which represent a very significant portion of the population are going to begin dying off.

Now if the Iraqi population contains 25 million people and the ages are distributed homogenously and the life expectancy is 75 years you would expect roughly 27,800 people per month to die of natural causes and 1,112,000 to die in a forty month period. So what the hell is Dr. Burnham talking about? To do a meaningful study you have to know the distribution of ages within the population exactly, or all bets are off.

The purpose of Dr. Burnham’s study was political. He wants the US to bring the troops home. If we do that before the Iraqi government is firmly in power is Dr. Burnham going to care about the resulting millions of deaths that are going to occur? This is the same thing that happened in Vietnam. The Democrats defunded the war and Nixon had no choice but to withdraw the troops. The blood of the millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians that were slaughtered as a result is on their hands. The sad thing is that they want to do it again, because it was their finest hour, very very sad.

I find the bias in most of these discussions, whether from the right or left, to pretty clearly show you can say/claim/assert almost anything in the media and you’ll find plenty of people to argue its merits, pro and con. It does seem however that many of the arguments coming from one of those directions in response to common sense observations are emotional nonsequitors that ignore the point.

Does anyone find the assertion that 80% of all claimed deaths in the sampling were supported by death certificates to be a bit odd? I wonder if you polled a sampling of the U.S. population you would find that 80% of those families who had family members who died, were killed, ran off with the plumber, etc. in the past two years would be able to produce a death certificate, especially on the spur of the moment?

Could it be that When asked by the interviewer if any family members were killed or missing in the past two years, the family might find it convenient to report that young Ahmed was “dead and we have a death certificate to prove it”, rather than say “Well, Ahmed used to live here but he’s off in Falujah killing Americans or whomever.”

How much do death certificates cost and how difficult are they to buy or counterfeit? Does it simplify matters if we have Ahmed’s death certificate rather than have to explain to enquiring police officials where Ahmed is, who he hangs out with, and why he didn’t report for police training as he was ordered. And since Ahmed is only 20 years old it’s probably best if we say he died violently, rather than from natural causes. Absent the age, sex and other details of the sampled population as well as those presummably killed we could as easily be counting the number of insurgents as those killed by all causes.

As a soldier who has been in Iraq and spoken with the people on a daily basis, I can tell you unequivocally that the Iraqis are well-known for exagerating EVERYTHING they say. We constantly got reports about “a hundred” insurgents living at a particular location only to find out that the place couldn’t accomodate 50 people if it wanted to!

A cache of “tons” of weapons would turn up maybe 10 AK’s and an RPG at most. “6 foot tall” men ended up being no more than 5’5″ at best. It’s not illogical to suggest that 600,000 is really about 60,000 but I’m no mathematician; I’m just a soldier.

His results are absurd. As the people at Iraq Body Count pointed out, there’s no way that anyone ever issued as many death certificates that this study implies. Either the respondents were lying or the survey people were lying when they said they chose a representative sample. Other glaring flaws are that our airstrikes apparently kill men and children but almost no women. How do we get a smart-bomb to avoid women but hit their kids?

His statistical procedures may be completely valid, as mine would be if I surveyed a hundred people in the Bronx for the asking price of the Brooklyn Bridge. I can spend weeks showing all sorts of interesting things about the spread of the prices, but I’d still be buying the Brooklyn Bridge from a smelly homeless person.

If we statistically sampled the above posts offered by those individuals clearly FOR the war, I’d be willing to bet a case of Leinenkugel’s Red Lager that they’d be overwhelmingly heavy on systematic analysis of the Lancet study as well as inclusion of refuting evidence.

Conversely, if we did a statistical sample of posts submitted by those OPPOSED to the war, we’d find they were overwhelmingly heavy on slogans, non-sequiturs, circular logic, and unsupported assertions.

Has anyone wondered why after the prof stated they adjusted things from the lessons they learned from the previous farce of a study why the PJM interviewer didn’t press that issue? Why didn’t the interviewer dig and find out what procedures and methods went haywire in the first study? Doesn’t this now put doubt into the validity of this study? That these researchers have a track-record of going into the “field” without having all their ducks in a row? Why wasn’t this broached during the interview? The prof’s haste to generate perspective altering numbers has already delivered faulty numbers once…why in the world would we think that these numbers are now trustworthy?

Since Saddam had a track-record of rewarding families of homicide bombers in Israel…why in the world would we not think that families in Iraq wouldn’t be tempted to also get the idea that the U.S. might make restitution to families of so-called “lost loved ones” by declaring inaccurate data in efforts to generate cash for the household? I’ve traveled throughout the world…one thing I’ve realized is that truthtelling is not a requirement among Muslims. Muslim leaders are on record to admitting that they would lie if it would benefit or further their religion in some way. Why would we anticipate accurate answers from a culture that is not bound by truthtelling?

How convenient. Throw up the figures just before an election then afterwards say, “Oops, I guess I made a mistake.” The number of civilian deaths wasn’t so great afterall. Then, justify the falsehood under the banner, “It doesn’t matter how many have been killed I (we) did a service just by pointing to the issue.” This sounds a lot like, “The ends justify the means, especailly when they’re my desired ends.” So much for intellectual honesty. Perhaps the creators of this kind of “truth” will be honest enough to begin campaigning to remove truth and honesty from the dictionary since neither of these words appear to have much meaning anymore.

so, what’s your point. 100K, 600K, 1K…. all dead on a pack of lies….a lot of innocent civilians have died as a direct result of the US invading Iraq. What have we gained from it…or better yet, what have we lost from it….a helluva lot.

Does that rate seem plausible, given Hungary’s superior infrastructure and almost 50 continous years of peace? Is it possible that both the pre- and post-war mortality rates are too low? Why not?

Burnham: There are many old people in Hungary , 40% are over age 55 vs. 9.3% in Iraq over 55. That’s the difference.

That is a non sequitor and completely unresponsive.

Sure there are more people over 55 in Hungary than Iraq. And the reason Hungary has a higher percentage of the population over 55 than Iraq, is, of course, because of Hungary’s superior health system.

But that is completely irrelevant to the question being asked.

Why? Because the question is asking, in part, in essence, about remaining life expectancy.

If the life expectancy of a Hungarian at age 80 is 5 years, and the life expectancy of an Iraqi at age 50 is 5 years, what does it matter what percentage of a population is over 55? The Hungarian at age 80 and Iraqi at age 50 are equivalently old – they each have on average 5 years left.

Having worked with small samples from very large populations, in the financing of international project, I have experienced and caught my own errors due to the large numbers to which data small samples are extrapolated. For example, a minimum food diet requirement of 1800 calories is statistically estimated in a a sample of of 25 clusters of about 50 adults each in for a country of 60 million. Two surveys reveal the following: first, the national food balance sheet shows 2398 cal are available from local food production and imports; second, family budget enquiries in the 25 cluster show actual consumption of 2,418 calories. In a country of 1 million person, the discrepance is not large , only 20 calories per capita, or 1 million cal. per day, which is equivalent to about 500 more tons of food to be produced or imported each day. Over one year, the total becomes 182,500 tons, which is significant for even 1 million persons. At $1,000 per ton, this becomes real money, or about $182.5 million, for a small country. Now friends, apply this “error” to a country of 20 or 25 million persons and observe the magnitude of the difference! It’s devastating. The lesson is that even small sampling differences become magnified/exaggerated when applied to large population (even when sampling errors are estimated).

In an attempt to validate the results of Mr. Burnham’s survey, I performed a survey of my own. I interviewed 6.2 billion people, each for one hour this last weekend. 99.9% believed his numbers to be just as valid as the ones I just gave.

1) The study provides estimates of increased mortality, not just military deaths

2) There’s a 95% chance that if they did the study again with the same biases, their estimates could be as “low” as 300,000.

My comments:

1) Passive body-count methods are unlikely to capture the extent of “regular” mortality.

2) The cluster sampling methodology is very common, has been used by the WHO and others to provide health-related estimates

3) Because deaths are so rare (5.5/1000), cluster sampling is less accurate

4) The binomial distribution for variance estimation might be more appropriate than the normal distribution, given the rarity of deaths

5) The fact that their recent study generated estimates nearly the same as the 2004 survey suggests that the methodology is reliable, if not entirely accurate

6) Assuming that the bias in the recent study is the same as the 2004 survey, there has clearly been a large increase in mortality in Iraq

I don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with their methodology. It’s safe to say that the increase in mortality is at least 300,000. Regardless of the number of Iraqis who died because they were directly involved in conflict with the CPA or other Iraqis, it’s a terrible loss of life. The US is partly responsible.

I think this number may be low low low! Look at it this way: America alone has used in excess of 3 billion bullets in Iraq. We have no internet reports on numbers of bullets used by the British or other allies.

What we do not know is:
How many cluster bombs
How many missles
How much Napalm
Deaths from DU
Deaths from IED’s
Deaths from Sectarian violence
Deaths from not aligned small arms fire
Deaths caused by Turkey’s incursion against Kurds in the north
Deaths caused by secondary affects such as starvation and disease
etc.

I think this number may be low low low! Look at it this way: America alone has used in excess of 3 billion bullets in Iraq. We have no internet reports on numbers of bullets used by the British or other allies.

What we do not know is:
How many cluster bombs
How many missles
How much Napalm
Deaths from DU
Deaths from IED’s
Deaths from Sectarian violence
Deaths from not aligned small arms fire
Deaths caused by Turkey’s incursion against Kurds in the north
Deaths caused by secondary affects such as starvation and disease
etc.

As I recall, before the war started, the claim was being made that over one million (per yr I believe) Iraqi’s, many of them children were dying because of (american backed) UN sanctions -some crazy number like that

Of course, it turned out it was SADDAM himself that was selling the medicine (that was in fact allowed in even under the sanctions)in the food for oil scam – but leftie major media rarely mentions that

However in reference to the million deaths from the sanctions – would not there be a net gain if you add in the lives now being saved by NOT having sanctions – and that’s assuming such numbers were real to begin with

Regarding the ranting about depleted uranium earlier in this thread, the following quote from “Uranium Information Centre” is quite illuminating:

“Depleted uranium is not classified as a dangerous substance radiologically, though it is a potential hazard in large quantities, beyond what could conceivably be breathed. Its emissions are very low, since the half-life of U-238 is the same as the age of the earth (4.5 billion years). There are no reputable reports of cancer or other negative health effects from radiation exposure to ingested or inhaled natural or depleted uranium, despite much study.”

In other words, the poster’s accusation of cancers etc. is a bald faced lie, no different in essence than any of the other often repeated lies that have appeared here today.

Given that the poster portrays a common leftist “belief” then I’d say that this is pretty much sums up everything you need to know about the modern left. Of course Bush has personally killed 650K Iraqis, depleted uranium causes cancer, even when proven otherwise, and so on.

The truth is, truth does not matter anymore!!! Let’s just make it up as we go. All I know is that I paid $.39 a gallon for gas today thanks to my buddy Hugo Chavez and the lovely humanitarians at Citgo(actually it was $2.05, but if I tweak the numbers it just sounds so much better). The one other thing I know is that my son died along with 600,000(+/-) innocent suicide bombers and I am going to get the fame and fortune that is coming my way! Thank you George Soros and C.R.E.W. Long live my 15 minutes of fame and may God bless Venezuela!!! Nancy Pelosi FOR PRESIDENT!!!! Her first order of business will be to appoint Teddy Kennedy as “Speaker of the Ale House!!!!”

I think this was a good article/interview, you went to the horse’s mouth for some answers, got ‘em (even if they don’t please to many folks, me included) and did the job that the self proclaimed “real media” should have been doing. You’ve just gained a regular reader.

For the critics: How many research studies have you EVER done that were ever published by anyone, let alone one of the most respected medical journals in the world?

The methodologies used by Professor Burnham are standard and common. In fact, the U.S. government does indeed utilize the VERY SAME methodologies as Professor Burnham does. In addition, Professor Burnham’s study findings regarding the pre-invasion baseline death rate are essentially the SAME rates as found by the CIA and the U.S. Census Bureau.

To The Critics: When you criticize the methodologies used by Professor Burnham, you are also criticizing the methodologies of the U.S. government, the CIA, and the Census Bureau!!!!! This doesn’t sound very patriotic does it? (The Right Wing are false patriot Pharasee hypocrits anyways).

To The Critics: I nominate you to go to Iraq and do all the additional cluster samples that you feel is necessary to “balance” out the findings!!!!

Then, report back to all of us about how “wonderful” our democracy is there that we have created for Iraq through military force and intimidation and bribery and abuse.

If you want to truly support the troops, then support them coming home ALIVE to their FAMILIES!!!!

BobC, I’m glad to hear that. I am trying to get a job at APL but have been concerned by reports on the political trends in Baltimore and MD. It’s good to hear that APL is different, which of course makes sense given its mission.

Despite statments to the contrary, the only attempts to look at the numbers are those done by people who feel the report is flawed. One does not need to support the war to believe the study is flawed. Unlike Rigobera Menchu, you are NOT entitled to your own truth.

It does not take an expert to be able to say that a plane crashed. Nor does it take an expert to do simple arithmatic. Occam’s Razor, in fact, hints that if you can reasonably disarm a complex argument with a simple counter-argument, the simpler argument is probably the most likely. It’s not always true, but a pretty good rule of thumb used by all sorts of people whose guesses must actually count in lives, money or some other scarce resources.

Moreover, it is a logical fallacy to support an argument simply because a) you’re inclined to agree (or disagree with it), b) because an expert makes it.

So appeals to authority are out, unless there’s a way to verify the authority’s claim. There is none in this case, at least supplied to us by the author.

The study – despite the desires of those who wish to support it – does not tell us anything about alternatives, even if the study was accurate. For example, somebody here mentioned MacNamara’s comments re: Viet Nam. What MacNamara’s comments don’t tell you is a) the truth, b) what the cause of those numbers actually was, c) what the alternatives were.

He guesses 3.2 million died. The commenter – like so many – assumes that those are because of America, neglecting that a) Viet Nam was at war long before America was involved, b) that many if not most of those caualties were inflicted by the Vietnamese on one another, c) how many of those casualties resulted from postwar behavior, d) how many of those casualties were deaths, e) how many resulted from idiotic leftist agricultural policies, f) how many resulted in starvation not just because of things like Agent Orange, but because armies made up of boys who should have been in the fields were taking in supplies on the hoof, g) Viet Nam was primariliy – wait for it – a civil war. That’s why the vast majority of Vietnamese immigrants are from the South of Viet Nam, and why it’s so hard to find a North Vietnamese-style bowl of pho outside of San Jose.

Full Disclosure, for the Hippie Morons: I’m Vietnamese; and you probably helped keep over 80 million people imprisoned in a totalitarian state for 3 decades.

Naturally, neither the real nature of the casualites or the results occupy any tenancy on the land of the liberal mind.

Not that that bothers the left. Like so many Cambodian deaths that resulted from left-wing ideas, those are the eggs ya gotta break to make your beautiful omelet.

Now, back to what I was saying.

The study, in a sense, maintains that while Saddam was bad, the situation is worse. Those advocating this position are essentially stating that Saddam in power – with his hundreds of thousands of bodies – was a better situation than now. That is, the murderous dictatorship was better than the shot at democracy being spoiled by the locals and natives… and fervently opposed by those who would rather get a pyrric victory against Bush at the cost of Iraq’s future (see previous comments re: Viet Nam). This is an argument for tyranny.

There goes the whole, “It’s America’s fault for supporting dictators” pablum. Unless, of course, one is supposed to believe that these people were ready for democracy 25 years ago, but not today.

Alas, some people never tire of the chickenhawk arguement. There are, hate to say, two problems with that argument in this context. (There are many simply in reason, but we’ll set that aside.) In this context, going to Iraq to fight or to do a body count of your own is irrelevant to whether or not this study is faulty. This is not a lab. You can’t reproduce the experiment, because you can’t control the materials… only the methods. Shocking as it is for those who earn their bread stirring up race/class/gender grievances, people are not the same, regardless of how brown we may be, or how smooth the skin around our eyes. Regarding method, the author does not actually supply much instruction.

But moreover, the assertion that one is obliged to disprove the veracity of an argument is not only juvenile, but, again, faulty reasoning. It is up to the one proposing an argument to prove the validity of the argument. Flipping it around is requiring that one disprove a negative, and that is not logically allowed.

One way to prove the validity of the study, would be to actually go to Iraq in all your peace-waging ways and find the bodies. Or provide a plausible explaination for where the bodies are or how they were disposed of. It is not enough to maintain without evidence that there was a massive conspiracy to cover up all the bodies, involving the Red Cross, the U.S. Government, the Iraqi government and so on and so forth.

We can’t even keep the smallest details secret. It is foolish to believe that we could keep all these bodies secret. The sheer numbers discredit that.

Given the coverage of events in Iraq, such as a roadside bombing that kills 6, it is simply implausible to believe that so many bodies would just be disappearing, waiting for that moment when a guy comes in with a survey to be revealed.

The problems of translators are many. For example, we state that there were death certificates of 80% of deaths. So we’ve caught the Iraqi government – which can hardly maintain regular water and power – has printed hundreds of thousands of these things, yet is also telling us they don’t have hundreds of thousands of these things.

Is it possible that the proof doesn’t exist in anything approaching the surveyor-translators’ assertions? Is it possible that a “death certificate” is a photograph or a sternly, spoken assertion of the truth? Where are the death certificates? Is there any verification from whatever office in Iraq prints these?

If Iraqis routinely commit reprisals for the killing of 13 people at a wedding, is it not equally probable that the deaths of hundreds of people daily would result in a lot more of these sorts of killings? Is there any tangible evidence of such things to a degree comensurate with these supposed levels of mayhem.

There are so many questions here and so many more. I’d like to see those defending the study answer some of those questions or counter any of the assertions I’m making with evidence, logic and/or facts. Bear in mind that “You’re just a rethuglican nazi fucktard racist Amerikkkan bastard” is not an argument, but, at best an assertion, and more likely merely evidence of dementia in need of medication and, possibly, restraining apparel.

1. “the 655.000 figure is excess deaths” Yes, and 601.000 of it is due to violence. Since the paper writes what people (claimed) their family members died of it is easy to assign it to difference causes. For example 130 people have died per day every day in car/suicide bombings since the war started. Oddly enough the media has only reported 5% of these deaths.

2. “how many papers have you published? Huh? This is the LANCET, and therefore above reproach”.

Desperate argument to refer to authority. Nevertheless the fact that it is a prestigious paper makes the weak arguments more interesting. Science is not immune to ideology.

Lastly to Sum guy who called people here “stupid” and than gave us this gem:

“The statistics provide a 95% confidence level that the “true” death toll is somewhere between ~300,000 and ~900,000 dead. 300k is just as likely as 650k, which is also as likely as 900k.”

The interval is only interesting if the sampling is correct, which is clearly unlikely here. Furthermore if you think the middle of a confidence interval is “as likely” as the tails I have to congratulate the American education system. Perhaps a couple of more classes in statistics instead of socialist dogma would have done you good?

By the way not all anti-war leftists are idiots. This debunking of the Lancet study is the best I have seen

Especially important is the point about death certificates. If the study is indeed correct in it’s sampling, we should have seen at least 500.000 death certificates with the cause of death being violence issued by the Iraqi authorities. This is the premises of the study after all.

Where are those records? Why not go from death certificated directly, instead of random sampling, that is sensitive to statistical (and in this case political) bias?

The before war death rate seems incredibly low. You state that less the 10% of people are above 55yo. This is indicate a substandard health system if people have such a short life span. This would mean a much higher death rate and 5.5%

Just an observation but has anyone noticed that the anti-war respondents resort to name calling while the ones critiquing the study attempt rational arguments to make their case. Makes me reason that the anti-war arguments are based more on emotional immature thought processes and less on rational objectivity. This correlates to the reports the mainstream media project in attempting to draw emotional empathy while discarding objectivity in order to attract an audience. Congratulations to you relational thinkers you are winning me over to your side.

I was wondering if there was any response to the proof of the first Lancet survey (which surveyed only 808 households) which claimed 100,000 died but was later proven by the UN (which surveyed 21,600 households) to be false, the actual figure was closer to 24,000. The Lancet study was out by over 400%.

OK, all you pwo-war keyboard commandos…Let’s say the US bombing of cities, power plants, water treatment centers and other infrastructure has only murdered 70,000 Iraqis, as Bush the Liar has posited. Now don’t you all feel better?
“To make people free, you must first kill them.” -A. Lincoln (paraphrased)

If this study is right we would see the ‘proof’ of it in the demographics, which would point to a stagnant population, flat line mortality rate, flat line life expectancy and so on as compared to the years under Saddam. However, just the opposite is true. Overall population is up by 2 million in 4 years, life expectancy is higher, infant mortality is lower, number of deaths per 1,000 is lower than it was during Saddam’s reign and this is WITH the problems seen there, and such things as fertility rate and number of births per 1,000 are lower which are leading indicators of putting off childbirth in order to efficiently manage family size. That last one in India is seen as a leading indicator of economic prosperity and hope for the future, and the exact same thing is seen in Iraq, with the Nation now being a net agricultural exporter, electricity production above the maximum that the system was designed to carry, all of the children now having staffed schools to attend, and over 55% of the Nation handed over completely to Iraqi forces to control and administer.

So, where are the dead folks? With the numbers from this study the dead should be piling up in the streets, unburied, day in and day out. What *is* happening is an expanding population, economy and employment, which has increased so much that unemployment levels are now within a few percentage points of most European Nations.

This is a very strange war that increases life expectancy,increases population, decreases infant mortality, expands the economy, feeds the Nation, and employs individuals at high rates at legitimate jobs. Actually, with those kind of changes, the world could use *more* such wars… fought properly, efficiently and with a look out towards building something better. Which is what every critic of the US since Vietnam has complained about… and once that kind of war actually arrives? Complaints.

The point that comes through in all of this is that we have no clue as to how many have died thus far. Anyone can base a study on favorable criteria and come out w/ a ‘legit’ answer. It’s a moot point to say he’s playing politics because everyone is. You can’t trust anyone or any number in regards to this issue. All you can do is try your best to sift through the ‘news’ and find your own answers.

Please pay attention. It was 80% of the small, hand-picked sample that had death certificates, not 80% of the projected 655,000. You are completely missing the dissenting factors point that the sample was too small and flawed.

When I made the first comment in this thread,on Oct 20, 10:52 AM 117 comments have been made. A few are duplicate commentators which I tossed out and a rough count is as follows:

88 against the study, statistics,etc.

22 for.

This is 80% think the study is flawed, possibly politically motivated and a ver few of all of the commentators, really understanding the real issue here.

MainStream Media (MSM) bias that is politically motivated.

Several of the commentators I have greater confidence in their comments because they have been to Iraq or lived in Vietnam. Both situations where the MSM played a pivotal roll in assisting the real villians here, i.e. those people that started the problems, continued methodically to kill civilians(remember Pol Pot- outgrowth of the US not keeping our treaty with SEATO.. look up SEATO folks) and today with the gangsters that have no problem killing innocent civilians with car bombs,etc.

The MSM and those 22 supporters of this study have contributed to what is commonly known as “aid and comfort to the enemy” or as one commentator “seditious behavior”.

The proof of MSM bias is this:

Watch the 3 network evening news.

Tell me if you did an actual word count of what they all said.

There were more “words” used to support this study than “words” used to refute the study. Why? Read this and draw your own conclusions.

Evan Thomas is the son of Socialists Norman Thomas and current Editor of Newsweek.

He said it. I didn’t!

Further proof needed?

Polling:

Are you aware that the recent CBS poll showing President Bush approval

rating of 32% was based on more democrats than GOP?

Total respondent 1,018

Republicans 272 26%

Democrats 409 40%

Independents 337 33%

Again, using statistics, why couldn’t CMS have had an equal balance? Because it would have skewed the poll. Bias at work.

Another aspect that the apparent supporters of the study/Bush haters anti-Iraq seem to forget is this.

If Bush was “creating more terrorists”, if Bush was killing more civilians, please explain why the gangsters want Bush out and the democrats in?

They supported Kerry, they support any person/organization that supports them. This study supports them. More importantly though they know that US polls as in vietnam, Mogodushi and other pullout situations that unlike the Americans during WWII we are soft and will give up if the going gets tough.

So what do these gangsters do? They raise the violence. All of you commentators, do you for one minute believe that the majority of our military is rampantly killing people like Kerry said was done in Vietnam?

Stories like Abu Ghrab, Gitmo, etc., blown totally out of proportion by the MSM have done nothing but given

“Aid and comfort” to the enemy.

If every anti-Bush commentator on this thread were intellectual honest, they would admit to:

1) By given credence to this poll this provides the gangsters with more conviction that we will give up and leave the Iraqis to these gangsters.

2) That the MSM bias, driven by pure political animus towards President Bush has prolonged this war, has contributed directly to the deaths of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians again .. all because the hate Bush.

I am more disgusted with those people that have believed the MSM crap then I am with the MSM simply because at least the MSM is blantant with their bias. You commentators that resort to name calling, irrationale statements – you are doing what is really sad “feeling” instead of “thinking”.

There will never be any positive results in this world if people respond to their “feelings” rather than if they “think”. If you commentators that support this study were honest, you would look at how much you just hate Bush. Not this front on the war on Terror. Just Bush. And this is pure emotional responses, based not on any facts.

And don’t give me the MSM baloney regarding WMDs… they were found.

You just don’t want to believe the facts. Saddam ignored the world’s sanctions 13 times. You don’t believe that. It is a fact.

The MSM bias is killing people. That is a fact and you commentators are supporting the killing of US soldiers and innocent civilians by these gangsters by believing the MSM crap and wanting the US to abandon these people that want desparately to live without having a religious nut case like Satr,et.al. requiring them to wear burkas, etc.

You are assisting religious zealots to take over the world. You are worse than they are. At least these zealots believe in something. You just hate Bush regardless of how much damage currently or in the future to all of us including yourselves.

I did my own study and I think Dr Burnham has drastically UNDERCOUNTED the actual numbers of deaths. My study concluded that there have been 142,586,312 deaths in Iraq as a result of the US invasion. We have double checked our math and our statistical method and they are above reproach.

(Psst. Don’t tell anyone that is about 6 times more than the total population in Iraq.)

“…what’s your point. 100K, 600K, 1K…. all dead on a pack of lies….a lot of innocent civilians have died as a direct result of the US invading Iraq. What have we gained from it…or better yet, what have we lost from it….a helluva lot.”

I love the anti-American leftwing (ie, MSM, hollywood, democrat party) who continually cite the “lies” and “deceptions” that “Bush” supposedly used as a precept to go into Iraq. However, the leftists also point to the NIE from “16 intelligence agencies” as proof that the opening the Iraq theater in the war against Islamic jihadis is “producing more terrorists”. You can’t have it two ways – the intelligence the WH and US Congress saw prior to entering Iraq was gathered and analyzed by the same agencies that produced the NIE. So that must be “lies” too, or not because it supports the anti-Americans’ views? Hmmm…..

As for this so-called “perfesser”, well, there are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics. This “study” doesn’t pass the “stink test” that we use on this type of publication. Seems the lads over at Lancet are of the same ilk as those over at the NYT, the Boston Globe, or some other leftist fishwrap.

Look, I’ve made this point before at other web/blogsites. There is absolutely no way that roughly 500 Iraqi civilians have died every day since the beginning of the Iraqi war in March of 2003. If the number of civilians death had been even 100 a day, the lamestream media would have be on this like stink on a skunk.

For one thing, without any demographic information, there is absolutely no way to distinguish between casualties who were true male civilians and Muslim male insurgents. If it is the latter, we should be celebrating the high casualty rates because that means a lot of Islamofascist wannabes are being terminated which can only mean that there will be less militant vermin for the Iraqi government to deal with in when we withdraw and turn over all security operations to the Iraqis.

Also, I bet dollars to donuts that the vast majority of casualties are male. This raises red flags already. Did this study at least separate out Muslim males between the ages of 17-50 (fighting age) and women and children?

At the height of civilian casualties DUE TO MUSLIM TERRORIST ACTIVITIES, the death count averaged about 25-30 civilian deaths a day. Over a period of a year that’s about 15,000 civilians. Personally, I think the number is somewhere around 35,000 total over the whole three year period, with about 95% of the casualties being the direct result of Muslim on Muslim violence. To blame Bush or America for this would be like blaming a doctor for the spread of cancer when he finds it and is trying to cure the patient through the best medical techniques available.

“One way of tracking enemy casualties is to monitor burials from the air; there is nothing new in this.” ROFLMAO hahahahehehehahahahehehe omg Can you name a single conflict in which MASS casualties were counted this way?

The Lancet report was purely a political article, aimed at fueling the liberal media. The report is obviously flawed, but you won’t find any of the major drive by media investigating how the numbers were arrive at. That’s because they love the numbers and it gives them the amunition to point out how bad the US is and what we have created in Iraq.

In an attempt to validate the results of Mr. Burnham’s survey, I performed a survey of my own. I interviewed 6.2 billion people, each for one hour this last weekend. 99.9% believed his numbers to be just as valid as the ones I just gave.

“Put one man in hot water and another man in cold water and on average they will be comfortable”. Looking at the comments on this page Tom’s comment has raised the IQ of the other contributors substantially. You people below the 49 parallel if you know where that is and what that means get fed too much pablum on CNN by imbedded journalists. Your news media should get the Joseph Goebbels award for misinformation and you that defend them and believe them keep on bleating. Sad comment on American education system that produces such sheep.

Over the last couple of years there have been a few different sources suggesting the number of dead were in the hundreds of thousands. If you regularly read the blogs of those who live in Iraq and Baghdad, you will find the conditions there are very bad and have been getting steadily worse each month. Some bloggers have even disappeared. Numbers can always be skewed — just look at the last two US elections. If you want truth, people, you are going to have to do your own research at some point, and do some of your own digging. Relying on one source should not be your news input that affects your decisions. Read many sources before making a decision. The news media no longer supplies objective truth of any kind. If you see a number such as 600,000 dead, you owe it to yourself to research this and then share your research. Go out and find the facts and make the phone calls. Talk to people IN IRAQ — most of all.

Well- one survey said there are 3,00 people , civilians , killed in Iraq every month. Another survey said there are 3,000 people that die of AIDS in Africa every month, and we know that about 4,000 people each month die in car wrecks in USA . So it seem we need to pull those boys home to help us secure our driving skills!!

The estimated population of Iraq in 2000 was 15,600,000+/- a couple of hundred. That is ALL of Iraq.

The largest urban population was 6,337,758 in 2000.

How many Iraquis have died since 2000 based on this mans estimates (But remember he runs his estimates from October to October so he can attempt to influence national politics)? Well, you can see below that the population of Baghdad has an estimated loss of less than 400,000 over six years and a lot of those have simply moved.

I suspect that, based on the number of bodies “discovered” that are blamed on sectarian violence, the highest numbers would be in Baghdad would be the highest number and they are far less than 10,000 a year, or 20,000 since he last ran this report. Baghdads’ 2006 population was estimated at 5,800,000 +/- a couple of hundred. Can you imagine the uproar if almost a million of those people were killed in a year?

Somebody’s numbers are skewed, alright, and it sure sounds political to me.

I’m an independent, conservative Christian, neither Republican nor Democrat, and I believe that most politicians are liars, but the Dem’s just do it more brazenly.

I think they are all erstwhile students of Mein Kampf, and know that the “Big Lie” is almost always a winner when there are so many stupid and gullible people around. No wonder they have dumbed down the school system in this country.

I would like the good Professor to go to Iraq and run a census, get an accurate count now as compared to 2000, estimate a reasonable birthrate over six years, subtract the estimated total using the birthrate figures from the actual census, and then we could know how the population is doing. Is that unreasonable?

We absolutely know that there is a religious war going on underneath the desire to create a Democracy. The only answer to that is annihilation of those Muslims who do not want a Democracy. That is what we should have done in the first place.

Any readers who aren’t aware that air raids have been consistent and continue to this day are advised to check the facts. Air raids are happening right now, and will happen again tomorrow. Your tax dollars at work.

Another fun fact-check is to read the headlines (not even the whole articles) every day for a given month during this invasion. You will see repeated references to “[insert 2 to 3 digit number here) killed in Baghdad” almost every single day. When you add in the naturally occurring pre-war death rate you begin to see that war = death. Shocking to many, I know, but nonetheless quite true.

The comments of some here that the numbers can’t be true because the MSM haven’t reported them is simply untrue. These harsh numbers are there in full view everyday. It’s also true that several human rights organizations have monitored and reported on the troubling toll of our aggressive actions against a non-nuclear country that did not threaten us. (Compare and contrast to North Korea and Iran.)

One reason why you are not hearing about civilian death rates in Iraq topping 100 per day is that the prime minister has made it a crime for any Iraqi agency to release civilian death numbers. You will know even less as the Pentagon continues to make it impossible for journaists to work there.

I’m not saying that 600,000 is not a big number of people dying. But if you compare that number with the size of their population that is relatively a small number in 4 years. Here in the US we average about 2.5 million deaths a year based on a 300,000,000 population.

These types of numbers always reflect on the Nazi death machinery of WWII. Even a cursory study of that era leads one to the incredible difficulties involved in “disposing” of thousands of bodies per day. Even the Germans couldn’t figure out how to burn or bury them without building a massive crematorium infrastructure constantly running in multiple locations. Needless to say, this has not been done in Iraq.

In my opinion this overeducated statistically sampled clown is dancing at the ol’ Bolshoi…

Mr. Burnham justifies the extremely low pre-war mortality rate in Iraq by claiming that a very small percentage of the population (9.3%) is over the age of 55. But I guess he didn’t consider that the reason there are so few old people is because the DIE before they get old, which would push the mortality rate up!!!

PRESIDENT BUSH: No, I donít consider it a credible report, neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died and it troubles me and grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the…

During World War II there was a study in England that said 10,000s of thousands of Jews in Germany were missing and possibly dead. Their funding was removed and it was denied that it could be true and they were trying to embarass the government and everyone would have heard if 80,000 Jews had been killed.

Of course it turned out they were wrong and the real number was much higher.

People don’t want to believe it so they don’t. Fact is nearly 3,000 US soldiers alone have been killed and 10,000s of thousands of soldiers injured. This is despite armor and hiding in camps which the general population cannot do.

For arguments sake lets say only 150,000 have died for this war, does that make you feel better, all you that supported the war for what non-existent weapons of mass destruction!!!.

I’m a Ph.D. scientist at UCLA. Most interesting to me is that the editors of the prestigious Lancet — a SCIENCE journal, not a propganada rag — chose to accept for publication such an obvious piece of garbage. The physical-science equivalent of that article would be for me to publish a shallow polemic in favor of “cold fusion.” I see this as a reflection on (a) the intensity of anti-Americanism in nascent Europistan, and (b) the credibility of the scientific near-consensus on global warming. Nearly all the climate experts are BIASED about global warming, if only because we scientists are conditioned, our whole careers, to exaggerate the importance of our chosen field of expertise (and FUNDING).

You can’t just count deaths from bombings or guns. (though if you count shootings include things such as people in their home or buisness shot by a stray bullet etc…)

Lack of food and sanatation or power (airconditioning) must account a large potential of deaths. Lack of medical treatment, anyone who has any skill fled iraq because those are the first they shoot (insurgents not us)…

Lack of disease prevention or treatment for illness that may have been previously easily treated etc may have caused some of this. These things would effect a large scale of people so small increases in % could add up to lots of people dead over the years.

I do not think that we pay attention much to reports of iraqi police killed unless its a high number. If one is killed here one there one there, they dont say that on the news.

25 iraqi police casualties a day, now the police they have accurate records on. (12 dead a day) 4000 + a year

Now this is not high enough to account for 600,000 dead but just saying the steady drip effect would make more than 50k killed over these years.

One big thing people wouldnt think of is suicide. Suicide rates normally are pretty high as it is about 1% of deaths a year in the us are suicide. Now over there with peoples family members killed etc, suicide could add some to the death toll.

I dont know if all t his adds up to 600,000 but its gotta be a lot mroe than 50,000 as our government seems to want to believe.

If we don’t care about their deaths they sure as hell wont about ours and at the least dont expect t hem to care about ours. Not that they would anyway but just the idea of it…

This guy is basically just taking average deaths, then the deaths now per year and subtracting. So any “butterfly effect” type deaths are related too even if 10 extra people die from stepping on rusty nails since the invasion thats included because his estimate is baised on the totals.

Just remember sadam used to kill terrorists in his country. Probably many non terrorists.

Now death squads kill the innocent people, probably at higher numbers than before. Now us troops try to kill the terrorists but only 4% of the insurgency is alqueda.

I bet the % of alqueda in afganistan where they come from anyway is alot higher …

Burnham is either being disingenuous in his response to the question about his claimed 5.5/1000 prewar death rate, or he is academically incompetent. An older population does NOT imply a higher death rate: it implies the opposite. The way a country achieves an older population is by its population living longer, which requires a lower death rate. If a country has half the death rate of Sweden, we would expect its average age to be roughly twice as old.

PajamasMedia: The Lancet study uses a baseline mortality rate (the rate during Saddam years) of 5.5/1000 – almost half of the mortality rate of Europe. The mortality rate in the EU is 10.10/1000. [...] how is it possible that Iraq’s baseline is half that of the EU?

Burnham: One of the most important factors in the death rate is the number of elderly in the population. Iraq has few, and a death rate of 5.5/1000/yr in our calculation (5.3 for the CIA), the USA is 8 and Sweden is 11. This is an indication of how important the population structures are in determining death rates.

Dishonest or incompetent? Either way, he is not to be taken seriously.

Umm- he said numbers from morgues are not reliable- in other words you can’t count bodies to find out how many people died? You have to interview people and extrapolate from there? Oh yes that will be so much more accurate than counting the bodies… So one person tells you their cousin died, another person says a friend died, etc… and they are all talking about the same person. No wonder the number ended up more that 22X higher than any other study.

..the report that 600,000 people have died in Iraq is true….if you consider their 4,000 year history and all of the interveni wars, this number is accurate…give or take. If you are applying this number to the current war in Iraq, well then it’s just crap.

Doug’s comments above reveal a startling lack of information about what ‘No Child Left Behind’ actually involves. It was and is a grand vision but it needs work.

I posted earlier about the tons of depleted uranium that the US dropped in Iraq — the very stuff we are trying to keep out of the hands of terrorists who might build a dirty bomb with it — and the resulting horrific cancers there. We should ALL be concerned about this, if only because radioactive material can travel in the air, and I doubt anyone posting on this site wants to breathe it, to absorb it into their cells. You can google “depleted uranium” and “Iraq” and come up with any number of links for more information but here is one:

The number of violent deaths reported in this study relative to the population size and circumstances defy common sense to such a great degree that there can be no doubt the figures are not even remotely accurate. This joke of a study does not even rise to a level that would warrant discussion of its technical methodolgy. The author serves only to tarnish his reputation amongst anyone with half a wit.

During the Vietnam War (now well documented), the Vietnamese lost 1 million combatants and 4 million civilians. That’s 294,117/yr (5m/17years) or 24,509/mth. This death toll was mainly in jungles and villages. The lost of an estimated 655,000 Iraqis since 2002 ( 655,000/38months = 17,236/mth) where the deaths are in heavily populated cities does not surprise me-it’s probably a low number.

“Burnham is either being disingenuous in his response to the question about his claimed 5.5/1000 prewar death rate, or he is academically incompetent. An older population does NOT imply a higher death rate: it implies the opposite. The way a country achieves an older population is by its population living longer, which requires a lower death rate. If a country has half the death rate of Sweden, we would expect its average age to be roughly twice as old.”

This is a very good point.

Especially if you assume a death is a death no matter what age it occurred.

Prof. Burnham pushes aside traditional statistical methodologies when he uses clusters instead of random sampling. I would love to see a statistical expert review their data gathering process to see if you can draw any conclusions from the results.

(Prof Burnham)
“The methods we used are standard methods used world wide; the US Government financially cluster sample surveys as a way of providing health and other information in many countries which are assisted by the USA.”

Again the professor makes an assumption that the above events share the same characteristics as deaths from violence in Iraq.

I would have to assume that deaths in Iraq (especially collateral related) are very different events, when compared health and financial data in any given population.

Case in point, if a car bomb goes off at a particular location, the residents of that same neighborhood would poll a death rate much higher than a neighborhood just 5 miles away where no car bombs have gone off.

There is no way to verify the validity of the data if you do not compare the clusters used to the total number of suicide attacks in any geographical area.

Finally, any study that will not or cannot produce the raw data for review has the same value as the junkmail that we receive daily at our homes.

Come on! Don’t be so afraid to admit it. Operation Ooopsy-Daisy failed. We lost the war. It’s going from terrible mistake to worse. Most of you Walk-On-Water-Jesus loving religious-cult freaks don’t like to hear anything other than America can do no wrong. I love this country as much as a person can, yet I have no problem admitting our Dumber-Than-Nails president messed up worse than any president in our history. Go read your ancient bible written by silly magic people from our primitive past and see if it doesn’t tell you to begat a lamb or kill some foreigners or beg forgiveness from Casper the friendly ghost. If you don’t know how to think, please don’t try.

So, in other words, Professor Burnham’s conclusions are suspect at best, bull-hockey more likely. So much for modern academic research. Oh, for the good old days of varying, legitimate opinions based on verifiable, calculable investigation. Gilbert Burnham, meet Ward Churchill.

1)Of the 650K deaths reported, how many were really innocent and how many really NEEDED Killing?

2)If murderous bast**ds team up to kill innocent people in order to influence an election by swaying public opinion, what team is Johns Hopkins playing for?

3)Wouldn’t it be easier to win this war by lulling the American people into a false sense of security by NOT car/bicycle/donkey cart bombing innocent shoppers and worshippers, shooting marines etc., letting us rebuild the country and then VOTING us out once we got bored of all the peace and cheap oil?

Oh, yea, that VOTING part is a deal killer, ain’t it? Funny how that doesn’t matter to that “Every Vote Counts” bunch.

4)Did anyone notice that the increase in violence during the last few weeks might just get the Democrats a few seats in the House? It must warm the cockles of the hearts of you liberals to know that there are hundreds of terrorists out there willing to die for your political ambitions.

5)If terrorists kill in order to incite “scholars” such Burnham to churn out such tripe, would lives be saved by giving the good professor a suite at Gitmo?

It is apparent, and transparent, from the sublime to the rediculous, the lengths these former beatniks will ascend to. His political agenda obviously trumped whatever reputation he may have had, which now resides in the same crapper he pulled his figures from. Makes one wonder if he thought he was so smart to think so many would be stupid enough to swallow this load.

I read about polls in Iraq and I wonder how they are being done if:
1. The place is a mess as the MSM is saying.
2. The infrastructure is a mess as the MSM is saying.

In other words, these people are going door to door and taking polling data like so many census workers? Either the condition on the ground there is much better than the media reports, or they are lying about doing the census and they are making up the numbers.

Another example of number that do not makes sense was Bob Woodward saying that the Insurgency is making 900 attacks a week against AMERICAN forces (not counting sectarian violence against Iraqis). This is happening and we are not losing 500-1000 men a week? If there are that many attacks, the insurgency must be extremely incompetent not killing more US soldiers (and certainly no body is walking around taking polls), or Bob Woodward is making it up.

Let’s keep this “study” in context. First, the goal was to determine that there were indeed large numbers of casualties since the 100,000 number got shot down after it was published. No, 655,000 wasn’t picked out of thin air but using the methodology used, applying the casualty rate linearly across the country, the numbers become very very skewed. What I do find interesting is the few defending this use the “he is a John Hopkins and Harvard guy so don’t question his science”. Stephan Hawking who is smarter than this guy had his theories from “A Brief History of Time” disproven. People that support this guy and his results simply are doing so out of political motivations and real science be damned.

• “they could die of lack of sanitation”. The study explicitly asks what people died of, and “finds” 601.000 who died from violence. This is what we are discussing.

• US air strikes have been continuous yes, but NOT against civilian goals, as in the beginning of the war. By the way it since we have data of how many air strikes there have been we know that it would absurd figures of death per attack to get these figures.

• “we read each day about dead Iraqis”. Yes we do. The sum of all the civilian Iraqis reported dead in the media is 40-48.000 since the war began, not 601.000.

• “the right would attack Clinton if it was his war”. Maybe some would, I would not based on false figures. By the way there WERE exaggerated figures claiming the trade embargo killed 1 million Iraqi children in Iraq, and if I recall it was the LEFT that attacked the US and Clinton, not the right (the US later estimated fewer children died from these, but still in the hundreds of thousands. Of course this was Saddam’s fault, not Clinton and Albright)

• “OK maybe 601.000 is too high, I can’t defend the study, but let’s just split the difference and say 300.000 were killed”.

No. This is not how science works. You can’t get a idiotic figure using obviously flawed methodology and just discount it down. By the way this is the most likely propose of the study, in physiology called anchoring. You through out an absurdly high figure, even if people don’t believe it their mental estimate will go up.

I will ask again. Where are the 500.000+ violent death certificates issued by the Iraqi authorities?

Burnham is either being disingenuous in his response to the question about his claimed 5.5/1000 prewar death rate, or he is academically incompetent. An older population does NOT imply a higher death rate

There is no political bias, but there could be statistical bias (oversampling in Baghdad would likely reduce the size of the estimates as it is not a high-mortality geography). If you read the Lancet, which is not exactly a political journal, you would see that it also reports a confidence interval, which means that we can be 95% sure that the actual number of deaths in post-invasion Iraq is between 392,979 – 942,636. This wide, as is openly stated in the article, but makes all of this hooplah about 654,965 seem ridiculous. You may not like the results, but if you don’t believe them then you should refuse to accept most published polls. You must therefore publically take the following positions: The Democrats are not going to make gains in congress, the president is not less popular, the average price of gas is not going down (yes, that is a geographically clustered sample), and there is no reliable estimate of the US native born population. You can complain about the study but disregarding it is willful ignorance.

I would have two questions. First, what was the response rate? The second publication gives no indication of the response rate, and yet the first article seems to suggest that the response rate was nearly 100%. That’s absolutely incredible, seeing as it exceeds census bureau response rates during peace time in developed countries(which are mandatory, by law), and far exceeds the response rates of optional surveys. Second, what was the introductory question? We don’t get any idea from the article. Presumably, it didn’t involve a discussion of deaths since the invasion, but why isn’t it included? For example, if the interviewers introduce themselves by saying: “we are looking at casualties since the war began,” then it is higly likley that those households without any deaths would simply refuse the interview. In much the same way, for example, as if a survey of computer use came to a house that did not own a computer. The result of such systematic error would be a drastic inflation of the death toll. Third, doesn’t the professor’s own comments suggest that there may be problems with comparing the death rate pre-invasion to the death-rate post-invasion? What is the age structure of Iraq’s population now compared to what it was in the period prior to the invasion? Finally, what checks have the done to ensure the representativeness of their sample? This is especially important when the sample is not, for understandable reasons in this case, random…

I think I saw this nutjobs signature on the “acadimics” theory about explosives being used to bring down the trade towers. Stupid democrat-pandering. I have friends in Iraq that understand this situation is of the highest stakes. It offends me as a veteran to hear democrats and the MSM drag this country through the mud for their own political asperations. Everyday, someone from our country is killed over there, these people could care less, and it couldn’t be more offensive and disrespectful to the sacrifices they’ve made for Iraq and the world.

And to think we still cannot get rid of these pathetic people who insight death as a national past time. “Islam, A relgion of peace!” not hardly! They kill more of their own people in one month than we put to death in ten years for murder in America! Way to go!

Again I say this study is completely bogus. There is no way anything approaching 500 “excess deaths” a day would escape the lamestream media’s notice for three years, and certainly not Al Jazeera’s notice.

I will continue to contend that the vast majority of these deaths are male, and they are males of fighting age. Is this why the John Hopkin’s/Lancet study didn’t establish proper demographic information, so we couldn’t draw these conclusions given the lack of demography?

If there were random acts of violence, even in a male-dominate society like Iraq, you would expect to see roughly equal numbers of men, women and a lot of children (they have big families over there) being killed with maybe a bias toward males since they are out in public more. Little doubt most of these deaths are the result of Shia and Sunni clashes – Muslims killing Muslims in sectarian violence on the streets in direct contradiction to their Koran (I’ve read it).

One poster brought up Fallujah to make another valid point, but I want to use the Fallujah example to establish another valid observation. Having visited many of the Iraqi blogs, which can be accessed from American sites like the MudvilleGazette.com, the point was being made throughout the U.S. Marine effort to rid the city of Islamofascist riff-raff that when Muslim “insurgents” were wounded on the battlefield they were taken to the local hospitals and tagged as a “civilian casualty” – after all, they were wearing civilian clothes, right? One Marine unit involved in clearing action near one of those hospitals noticed that the vast majority of those being brought in were Muslim males of fighting age suffering from battlefield-type wounds. Now it was my understanding virtually all the civilian population within Fallujah had been previously evacuated so there was no way that these Muslim males were simply civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time. It would be interesting to do a narrow survey during the time period of the American offensive in Fallujah using the same methodology that Prof. Burhama thinks is legitimate and then see what kind of “excess death” numbers his team comes up with even though we know most all of the civilian populace had been evacuated from that region during that time.

The Israelis noticed the same pattern when they went into Lebanon to clear out Hezbollah. Hezbollah fighers were usually in civilian clothes (some were even dressed in female clothing!) and whenever any Muslim male was brought into the local hospital he was invariably tagged by stringers and western media as a civilian.

I don’t know why westerners insist on their insular ignorance with respect to the tactics used by Muslim radicals in trying to influence western media. North Vietnamese General Giap credited the American media and American anti-war movement (calling them his “anti-war friends” in his self-congratulatory memoir How We Won The War) for demoralizing the American people and revitalizing the NVA and Viet Cong after the communists’ disasterous Tet military defeat in 1968. Of course Cronkite and the rest of the media saw it as a huge defeat for America and that’s how its been taught by left-wing and not so left-wing profs to this day. A pack of lies, just like the screed the Nazis were “right-wing” when in fact they were anti-capitalist, national socialists who practiced collectivist government control over privately owned businesses and industry.

Actually the article states in 2004 there were 100K deaths and BY 2006 it was 650K. Assuming the best, that’s 550K deaths in 730 days or 750 deaths/day & 22,000 deaths/month. This is another sign of the degradation of journalism in our society today.

You wrongly claim that they provided 500,000+ death certificates. Try reading again – they claim they verified 80% of those they sampled, and then extrapolated to the number for the entire country.

Since the raw data wasn’t included, and no one has questioned whether or not there was other data that was excluded or ignored, they could have major problems with their methodoligies.

For example, if I went into Los Angeles’ barrio, New York’s Harlem, Chicago’s “South Side”, Miami’s Liberty City, and Atlanta’s downtown area, I’m sure you would think crime in this country was out of control!

Taking samples without qualifying the samples invalidates the entire “survey”. The sheer volume of the estimate should cause everyone to question it. As to why they release these “studies” right before elections, the answer to that is obvious – it’s not to present it when people are interested, as PJM suggests, but to score partisan points for a political agenda. If it wasn’t partisan, why not release the results after a longer review period? Why not release them in 2007?

But even if you don’t want to attribute partisan motives to the authors, they still have many flaws with their data that people are ignoring. The number is inflated above that from normal/natural deaths in many ways. For one, one of the reason that the population of Iraq is that life expectency is shorter in Iraq. Before 2003, many older people were killed en masse by Saddam Hussein who would be alive today if not for the actions of a brave coalition.

Let’s look at some facts that the Lancet study ignored:

1) People would’ve died from other causes (not directly related to war) since 2003 – Saddam has left hundreds of thousands of bodies in mass graves over the years – you would have to subtract that from the total.

2) The 5.5/1000 mortality rate might agree with the CIA, or any other source, but is probably not correct. If the mortality rate in the U.S. is over 8, how can it be under 6 in a country with near-third-world conditions? The mortality rate assumption is a gaping flaw that would drastically alter the studies results.

3) The sample size is suspect – I’ve already covered that. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the areas surveyed were “cherry-picked” to provide data to support the premise.

4) The premise of the entire study was designed from the start with the goal of proving that many extra people died as the result of war – when you start off looking for deaths, you’re bound to tailor your data to support the conclusion you’re after – and I think they did a good job of that.

5) No one has looked at the political leanings of the people who worked on this – mentioning Harvard researchers doesn’t imply impartiality – 90% of professors are Liberal in views and in their politics.

If you want to believe this study, then go ahead – you were probably opposed to the war already, and have your Cindy Sheehan bumper sticker firmly pasted to your VW.

I, for one, and not fooled by this (or any other) bogus “study”.

It is suspect in its amount, in its timing, and its motivation, and its methodology.

The best part is that people will buy this crap as fact when there are thousands of reporters running around the country who aren’t seeing the 17,000+ EXTRA deaths every month.

The best thing that we could do is learn the lessons of Vietnam – we need to get behind our men and women of the Armed Forces and show the world a united people who are determined not to lose.

Imagine if the Republicans had released “studies” showing that there were no Nazi atrocities, and voted to defund the Americans. Imagine if Republicans had called for us to pull out our troops from Europe, since after all, the Nazis hadn’t attack us.

Every leftie comment hear is essentially the same–ad hominem attacks with hatred at the base. Read them, and look for any attempt at intelligent discussion– it is not there. Instead it is ‘I won’t even bother to refute…’, or a variation on the ‘I hate Bush’ theme. Someone suggested that one has to go to Iraq to be able to see how ridiculous the study is… another does the ‘Bush is dumb’ thing (by the way, remember the release of military test scores and college transcripts that showed Bush scoring higher than Kerry? I guess Kerry must REALLY be dumb…). I look forward to Nancy Pelosi et al. heading Congress– for once the left will have to present an idea, and America will see them for the idiots that they are.

Go to any American City, near a major US Army or US Marine Corps Base, and ask 100 individuals if they “lost” anyone in the Iraq war!

Probaby come up with 5 families, per City/Military Base, that have had some dear one killed over there in the War, out of the approximately 3000 war dead we’ve had there so far!

Wow, 5, out of 100, equals 5%; since the US just reached 300 Million last week, as was all over the news, 5% of 300 MILLION is FIFTEEN MILLION AMERICAN WAR DEAD!

THAT is what Lancet did in Iraq!

The claim is presumably based on the so-called ‘main street bias’ claim:

The study suffers from “main street bias” by only surveying houses that are located on cross streets next to main roads or on the main road itself. However many Iraqi households do not satisfy this strict criterion and had no chance of being surveyed.

Unfortunately this is not an accurate description of the methodology. Burnham et. al. (the 2006 Lancet article) described describe the household selection thusly:

The third stage consisted of random selection of a main street within the administrative unit from a list of all main streets. A residential street was then randomly selected from a list of residential streets crossing the main street. On the residential street, houses were numbered and a start household was randomly selected.

In other words main streets were EXCLUDED leading to “residential street bias”.

All when the streets define a regular grid then EVERY residential street will cut a main street and choosing a main street at random merely fixes the orientation of the residential street (e-w or n-s for example). The houses are then chosen randomly over the length of the residential stree…so there will be no ‘main street bias’. There is however ‘residential street bias’ which would presumably lead to an UNDERESTIMATE.

When the streets do not define a regular grid then there will some bias. Exactly how much and if it is sufficient to overcome ‘residential street bias’ is unclear as it depends on the details of the street layout and the violence differential between main streets and residential streets.

The WSJ article written by a professional pollster referenced in one of the posts above clearly states that this survey is methodologically so unreliable as to be meaningless. There are established procedures for running surveys. Those were all ignored, in a ridiculous way. As a scince publication, Lancet should have been aware of those deficiencies. Of course, you need the WSJ to report it; NYT and the likes can not be bothered.

The 400,000 claim probably comes from a speech by Tony Blair on November 20, 2003. The claim turned out to be false and Blair was forced to retract.

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ’400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

The current number is larger than 5,000 but the investigation is undoubtedly severely hampered by the worsening security situation. According to a Washington Post article last year more than 300 sites are being investigated but only a fraction (less than 100) have been confirmed. In Iraq a mass grave is defined as a grave with more than 6 bodies.

Everyone should take a few minutes to read a non-partisan explanation of what Depleted Uranium (DP) is, and what it isn’t.

DP is NOT a nuclear weapon. It is used because it is hard enough to penetrate armor. It is also used as armor on some of our tanks.

DP is actually LESS radioactive than natural uranium because the more radioactive isotopes have been removed (thus the element is “depleted”)

Comparing DP to a nuclear weapon is like comparing a hydrogen powered car to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The specific elements are used for a certain purpose: Hydrogen because it is flamable; Depleted Uranium because it is hard.

But Hydrogen-powered vehicles do not get their oomph because they are nuclear. There is no atomic chain reaction going on there.

Same with DP. The misinformation that is spread around by people like Penny is used to make the U.S. look like we’re a bunch of murdurous jerks who like to poison families with nuclear tanks.

The WSJ had an article on this ridiculous study. The biggest but not only weakness in his “study” was the use of far too few clusters in his sample; perhaps 1/5 as many as should have been used.

The WSJ claim is false. Most such studies use 30 clusters while Burnham et. al.’s latest study (the Lancet article) used 50% more. Don’t you find it strange that most of the critics are laymen or scientists from outside the field of epidemiology?

The Australian newspaper The Age just published an article supporting the work. It was signed by:

Professor James A Angus, dean, faculty of medicine, dentistry and health sciences, University of Melbourne

Professor Stephen Leeder AO, co-director, Menzies Centre for Health Policy; professor of public health and community medicine, University of Sydney; chairman, Policy and Advocacy Group, Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine

Professor Alan Lopez, head, School of Population Health; professor of medical statistics and population health, University of Queensland

Professor John Mathews AM, professorial fellow, School of Population Health, University of Melbourne

Professor A. J. McMichael, director, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, ANU

Professor Richard Taylor, professor of international health; head, division of international and indigenous health, School of Population Health, University of Queensland; director, Australian Centre for International and Tropical Health and Nutrition

The following is the email exchange I had with Dr Burnham:[Read from bottom to top]

Reply to Dr. Burnham: All I can say is that, in addition to besmirching the institution you work for, you also call into question the publication and “those who understand sampling methods”. I have discussed your sampling method with friends here in Arizona who have national reputations in statistical surveys , none of whom can be said to support the Iraq War, and without exception, they question the methodology used by you. Specifically, one stated that the Wall Street Journal article on your survey accurately portrayed the deficiencies in your sampling. I think you have joined Dan Rather as a legitimate victim of the wrath of the bloggers.

Response of Dr. Burnham: On the contrary. The authors have been gratified by the overwhelming support of the public health scientific community–in particular those who understand sampling methods, biostatistics public health in conflict, and international health issues. The Lancet, as the world’s leading medical journal, only publishes papers whose methods and results are heavily reviewed by the world’s leading authorities and found to be solid.

Original Email to Dr. Burnham: Whatever might be said about your survey, which resulted in the estimate of 655,000 “excess deaths” during the Iraq War, the bottom line is that you put the credibility of John Hopkins University on the line. Consequently, as your study is proven to be statistically unreliable–and most pollsters and statisticians agree it is–so does the credibility of John Hopkins suffer. One would think that a professor at such a prestigious institution would care about that. Apparently you didn’t and don’t. For that, you should be fired.

One glaring problem with the study that can be easily corrected is the absence of sufficient detail reported. The authors ought to publish tables of online supplementary data (many scientific papers nowadays do this) to allow for a thorough examination. For example, there should be a table listing each cluster, its location (governorate, administrative unit, main street), and number of violent deaths. A second table would list each violent death, the associated cluster, gender, age, whether a death certificate was presented, date of death, cause of death.

I bet a quarter that the authors would find many excuses to avoid doing this.

I don’t understand why the public, and more specifically the scientific community, is not clamoring for this.

1. People would’ve died from other causes (not directly related to war) since 2003 – Saddam has left hundreds of thousands of bodies in mass graves over the years – you would have to subtract that from the total.

They did – the number 550,000 refers to EXCESS deaths above the number that would have occurred had the mortality rate before the war stayed the same.

Not Fooled:

If the mortality rate in the U.S. is over 8, how can it be under 6 in a country with near-third-world conditions?

Because mortality rates depend on age distribution. You get very few deaths when the population is young. And after all the wars…Iraq’s population is VERY YOUNG – a median age of under 20 compared to the mid 30′s for the US.

According to the CIA World Factbook the estimated 2006 mortality rates (deaths/1000 people) are

Iran 5.5

US 8.26

Iran’s median age is 24.

Not Fooled:

The sample size is suspect – I’ve already covered that. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the areas surveyed were “cherry-picked” to provide data to support the premise.

Sample sizes are never ‘suspect’ – but can be too small to give much of interest. The paper contains a nice example. They redid the calculations for the same period as the first study and found 112,000 deaths and a 98% certainty that the number of deaths would be greater than 69,000. With the smaller sample size of the first study they found the most likely value was 100,000 deaths and that there was 98% chance that the true value was above 8,000. The second result isn’t ‘less right’ but it’s less interesting.

Is this guy for real? The reason there are so few old people in Iraq is because so mamy die young … before they reach reproduction age … and hence a very different propulation profile …. can you really use his method in a war zone and get reasonable results? Obviously not …

To Tom W:
Re: “20006 Mortality rates (CIA World Factbook)
China 6.97 US 8.26″
Your example illustrates my point. China’s population is aging at an extremely high rate, and its average age is expected to surpass that of the U.S. in a relatively short period of time. Admittedly, low mortality and low fertility are both factors which are acting concurrently to rapidly increase the average age of China’s population.

Do you really think that an aging poulation is a sign of a high mortality rate, as Burnham would have us believe? Or, are you just being argumentative?

I am a medical student, and I am also working on my master’s degree in epidemiology. You people are pretty much all suffering from denial, which is very human and understandable, but also very tragic. You let what you want to believe influence your handling of facts.

Someone wrote: “would you want your doctor to get his medical information from the Lancet?” To that, I can respond, I most certainly will, as well as JAMA, NEJM, and everything else on the Medline and PubMed databases.

This is not a complex study. Cross-sectional population-based cluster sampling is considered the gold standard for estimating mortality in developing and unstable regions. Dr. Burnham’s methodology is superb.

The most grievous sin a scientist can commit is to make up data. Are you really paranoid enough to believe this to be true? Do you think that a peer-reviewed journal like the Lancet is too stupid to notice and take no action? Occasionally, ego- and prestige-driven scientists do make up data, and they are invariably caught and utterly disgraced. But I can tell you that absolutely no one goes into the field of epidemiology for the prestige or money. You have to be ridiculously intelligent, the pay is terrible, and the hours are extremely long and stressful. They did this study because they cared.

Do you think that people get PhDs in a field like this by being stupid and petty? How many of you have what it takes? Not very many. This research team is caring and insanely committed to gathering good data, putting their lives at extreme risk to do so. I can tell you that among my medical student peers, we all accept the findings of Dr. Burnham. We, who averaged 1500 on our SATs and 34 on our MCATs, hold this research team in the highest regard. History will vindicate him from your ridiculous interpretations of his study, and will lump you together with the ideologues who deny the Holocaust occurred.

How many of you can actually describe what a cohort study is? A case-control study? Do you know how to calculate attributable risk? Who among you can do the most basic of statistical calculations? Variance? An F-test? Who can tell me how to calculate a p-value? Do you have any idea what SPSS and SAS are? Or are you just another armchair critic, too lazy and ignorant to get a useful education that is of some use to the rest of humankind?

Why isn’t anyone attacking the CIA’s prewar mortality estimate for Iraq? You are cherry picking your data, and I think you are fools for it.

Here is something to consider.
This studies numbers are very high.
What IF they are accurate?
What if when we air strike a factory we kill thousands of innocent people a day?
What if our government is conducting conscentration camps to eradicate the “insurgence”?

In when frace/germany took over parts of russia the “insurgence” were seen by the russians as “patriots” that would fight and die for their land. What makes a suicide bomber that wants his country back any different?

Innocent soldiers on both sides die, but because it is on their land it is up to them whether or not we take it from them completly. This administration FUBAR’d this operation and should have use tactical strikes against a cult and not an all out war against a country. Neither side is innocent, but we are the more guilty.

Perhaps if our administration listened to their generals we would not be in this mess.

Even if the report is not true, with ramadan in Iraq fanatics are defending their country and beliefs with a religion on their back.

I don’t think we went to war for oil. I think we should. If we are going to rely on a resource outside the US we may as well force them to sell oil to us for pennies at a barrel or blow them up and occupy the land. This is called Imperialism, and USA should OWN Saudi Arabia and not the other way around. Don’t forget Operation Desert Storm when Bush Sr. sent our men to fight a war for the Saudi’s that was won too quickly.

Do you really think that an aging poulation is a sign of a high mortality rate, as Burnham would have us believe? Or, are you just being argumentative?

I would have thought it was self-evident. Apparently not.

Perhaps this will convince you.

……the number of deaths per 1000 people can be higher for developed nations than in less-developed countries, despite standards of health being better in developed countries. This is because developed countries have relatively more older people, who are more likely to die in a given year, so that the overall mortality rate can be higher even if the mortality rate at any given age is lower.

In fact the ‘age effect’ is so strong epidemiologists routinely ‘age adjust’ two populations before studying the effect of other factors on mortality rates.

Also as I’ve already noted Iran’s mortality rate is 5.5 deaths per 1000 (the same value found for Iraq before the invasion) while the West Bank’s is 3.92. The median age in Iran is 24 while the West Bank is 18. The US rate you will recall is 8.23 and its median age is 36.

The Japanese culture produced Kamikaze pilots that flew planes into ships as a last resort.
Culturally they saw surrender as dishounrable hence the ill treatment of American POWs in the Bataan Death March.

We made it clear that the only way that they could end the conflict was by unconditional surrender.

We warned them about the bomb 3 days prior, the warning was disregarded, boom went Hiroshima.

We then asked for their surrenderd, they basically said maybe. We dropped # 2 and they still didn’t wan’t to give in, it took Hirohito getting on the radio to convince them.

Germany was pretty much the same story. It’s a mind set. Devastation must be willfully and effectively be visited upon the enemy and those that support them.

Winning hearts and minds is not how a war is won, a war is won by the total elimmination of the enemy’s will to fight.

The high end estimate is not enough! In order to decesively win a war one must exact a heavy enough toll to force upon the enemy the fact that further resistance risks the total destruction of themselves, their families, friends, culture, and religion.

Bottom Line:No conflict has been successfully resolved since the end of WW II. If you put the two letters UN in front of any word it negates them!

It’s sad. I watched that press conference live in the Rose Garden. When the President said, “I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to, you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.”

In our own Civil War 620,000 men, women and children were killed over a period of five years.

Why are Americans so afraid of a high death toll during another country’s civil war? Is it because we feel guilty about our military presence there?

What is most hilarious about the left is their combination of stupidity, with believing themselves to be intellectuals and calling others stupid.

We don’t think the study found 500.000 death certificates. But LOGICALLY if 601.000 were killed in violence, and 87% of those in a “random” sample could provide death certificates, there most have been (at least) 500.000 death certificates issued.

Do you understand, Slate? Or is the left as ignorant about statistical sampling as economics, foreign policy, crime etc?

For the article to be credible there most be at least 500.000 violent death certificates issued by the Iraqi authorities. Otherwise a random sample of could not have found 87% with certificates.

Does anyone believe there are 500.000 certificates issued? Why not show us the records and end the debate.

Another memo to the left: Please stop sounding like impressed high school students by quoting confidence intervals. Confidence intervals are MEANINGLESS when the methodology is flawed.

Someone asked what the correct figure is. We now roughly how high this is, about 40.000 civilians and Iraqi security forces, and additional thousands of insurgents (the more the better). Most studies show about 10-15.000 civilians killed each year after the war. This is a tragedy, but still less than the 30-40.000 average during Saddam. It is however true that the last years of Saddam were not as violent than the average.

PRO
The survey counted all deaths and subtracted the 5.5/1000 from the total. This method detected deaths from accidents, malnutrition-dehydration-disease, political education stresses (camps possibly hidden from alqiada), and rampant violence. Many of these deaths would appear normal but their higher rate would be due to conditions caused by the war.

CON
The “democratic” political leadership of western civiliation will occationally need to assert total control over its constituency. Perhaps in preemptive way. An ounce of prevention is worth apound of cure. Big numbers can justify or at least distract long enough to deploy adequite force.

BTW
The typical army is becoming an army of occupation rather than an army of conquest.

I think the only vulnerable point of the study is that very little is known about the data itself. We have method and sample sizes and totals of responses.

What we don’t know is who selected the interviewers, how well they understood and carried out their instructions, what recent death certificates mean in Iraq and how adequately they were inspected.

We also don’t know much about how honestly ordinary Iraqis wish to respond to a survey such as this.

It is very unlikely that data or conclusions were faked at the higher levels. It is the field work that may be faulty.

The data will eventually be given. That may or may not strengthen the 655K conclusion.

It also is possible that the data is not clear and the matter turns to mush. We shall see.

But whatever the professional fate of Burnham and this survey not one of those actual dead in Iraq will be revived whether one likes one number and not another. The important matter is how to improve things now.

Yep, you cite two lines out of 28 that I wrote as if that were my statement in its entirety. It seems that you’re intimidated by references to things like academic credentials and intelligence, which, I’m guessing, probably has something to do with your own insecurities about your appalling lack of such things.

I wonder, did you also read 1/14 of the Lancet study before coming to your conclusions about it? Did you even get that far? Sam, I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that you have not yet read this study, and I’ll bet you another hundred dollars that you haven’t read ANY firsthand scientific study ever in your life. The problem is, scientific papers tend to be rather dry and complicated, and dumb people like you would rather be off watching the ol’ TV, being told what to think.

Sam, in one of your earlier posts, you bet a quarter that the authors would avoid, at all costs, publishing supplementary data in non-summarized form, and you didn’t understand why the scientific community was not clamoring for this. As a member of the scientific community, I’ll answer this question: I have absolutely no interest in reviewing huge spreadsheets of someone else’s data that hasn’t been analyzed or summarized. No one else in the scientific community is, either. The file exists someplace as a spreadsheet on the authors’ computers, and they are 100% obligated to share that file with members of the scientific community who are interested in seeing it. The fact that you don’t know this shows how little you know about how the scientific method works. In reality, it would add nothing whatsoever to the findings of the study to look at all the raw data. This is why scientists aren’t banging down the doors to have a looksie at it. There’s a reason why people invented statistics computer programs: things like descriptive statistical outputs and tables and graphs are useful for doing such crazy things as summarizing your data using means and confidence intervals. As a reader, I’m perfectly content to let the statistics programs analyze the data, let the authors assemble that data into charts and graphs, and read a concise, detailed description of what methodology, exactly, the authors used to gather their data. The Lancet study was truly outstanding in this regard.

If the authors of this study made up their data, wouldn’t it be just as easy for them to report that made-up data as a spreadsheet with thousands of entries? If you think their data is made up, come up with a substantive argument that’s based on something. Don’t come up with a conclusion first that’s based only upon what your emotions wish were true and then invent facts to support that conclusion. When I see a person display such constipated thought processes, I come to the only rational conclusion there is: “That person’s got poopsies for brainsies!”

To anyone who would like to actually read the Lancet study, it is available for free download as a PDF here:

Do you really think that an aging poulation is a sign of a high mortality rate, as Burnham would have us believe? Or, are you just being argumentative?

I would have thought it was self-evident. Apparently not.

It isn’t. And an aging population doesn’t seem to me to be a sign of a high mortality rate either. It seems to me a sign of a high mortality rate is a low life expectancy.

Nevertheless, I see the point about how a country with a high life expectancy could have a higher mortality rate than a country with a lower life expectancy.

It partly has to do with the probability of death being 1. And it partly has to do with the country mortality rate being a sort of a weighted average composed of the sums of total pop of a particular age and mortality rate of that particular age.

Suppose there are two countries, A – 75% of the population age 25 and 25% age 75; and B – 25% of the population age 25 and 75% age 75. Suppose the mortality rates for 25 year olds are A – 10%, B -5%, and for 75 year olds A – 80% and B – 50%. Total population of each is 1 million.

Obviously, the life expectancy and average age of B is much greater than A, and at either specific age the rate at which A’s die is much higher than the rate at which the B’s die.

Yet, in absolute numbers:

75,000 A 25′s, and 200,000 A 75′s die in any one year.

14,000 B 25′s, and 375,000 B 75′s die in any one year.

So the mortality rate of the country A is 275 per thousand, while the mortality rate of the country B is higher, 375 per thousand.

What the higher mortality rates at any specific age mean, is that the life expectancy of A is lower, and, that final, absolute probability of death = 1 is reached sooner in A.

The CIA factbook shows Iraq’s death rate to be 5.37 (est 2006). That would mean the death rate went down in the last few years.

The first study was found to be flawed by another study using a larger sample size. The second study is said to validate the first flawed study. I would have to think that the second study suffers from the same flaws as the first.

I might not have any PHD’s or a medical student or whatever, but since this is the Internet, I’ll claim to be God thus establishing myself of having the supreme authority.

In their 2004 study with the same methodology they found over 200.000 killed in Falujah alone. This was obviously too large, so they just removed the Falujah cluster. But the researchers did no attempt what so ever to explain what bias gave rise to this absurd figure, and used the same method to get the 655.000 figure.

This is an unfair description. They threw out Fallujah because they regarded it as a singular event that was considered unrepresentative of the rest of Iraq. I doubt many would disagree. As for the estimate of 200,000 dead – they state clearly that this is a HIGHLY UNRELIABLE estimate based on a SINGLE cluster. As anyone familiar with statistics knows estimates can be made from any number of samples but when the number of samples is too small the estimates aren’t of much interest.

Tina said;

For the article to be credible there most be at least 500.000 violent death certificates issued by the Iraqi authorities. Otherwise a random sample of could not have found 87% with certificates.

Does anyone believe there are 500.000 certificates issued? Why not show us the records and end the debate

I doubt the records exist. The death certificates were issued by doctors to the families but it unlikely there was functioning central registry because of the chaos, lack of electricity, etc.

As an aside, I doubt that those who suggest all death certificates should be counted understand the enormity of that task.

In America there is no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. They both use statistics to lie in the name of national policy. Clinton’s national policy to use one example was to misinform you in order to breakup Yugoslavia so that you forget Lewinsky, impeachment and absorb the Balkans and expand NATO a step by step process to encircle Russia and her dominance on Asian energy sources. Clinton told you that Serbs expelled 1, 000, 000 people from Kosovo and killed 400, 000 so he had to invade for humaniterian reasons same kind of lie Bush is using to give American companies control of Iraqi oil. It has already happened-Russians, French and Chinese oil companies are out of Iraq and contracts are given to Bush’s boys. One dead Iraqi in the name of Halliburton is one too many. Clinton’s Balkan wars and today’s occupation of Kosovo by NATO are based on blatant lies. The only difference between Clinton in the Balkans and Bush in Iraq is that Clinton won so the Clinton lie does not matter to most Americans.

The Independent UK has a very troubling report about the health situation in Iraq. The link is below. 68% of Iraqis do not have access to safe drinking water. Only 19% of Iraqis have access to sewage disposal. 70% of the children who have died since the war’s beginning, have died of treatable problems, like diahhrea (sp?) but part of the problem is that 18,000 doctors have left Iraq since 2003. The US was to have built 180 hospitals by 2005, but so far it has only completed 4. The number of dead that the prof came up with doesn’t seem that wacky when you start to take all of this into account.

There is so much false data created by the nano second, how can anyone believe a thing they read or hear?
Isn’t this just another example of hyperbole run amuck? I am so sick to death of the BULL and the “That ain’t no Bull” crap we hear from todays oh so knowledgable vice rimjob pontificant. I think I will just have to make a certificate to that fact.

In response to MATT, who somehow thinks the depleted uranium being dropped on Iraq is comparable to the action of green-car hydrogen fuel cells … WIKIPEDIA!? THAT is your source of information?!
Information seekers can go to any number of defense department web sites to read how safe the stuff is.

Try reading an independent (and CREDIBLE) source for information about this toxic stuff.

The high response rate of the survey has also been questioned. 98% is an astounding rate compared to typical rates in Europe and North America. It turns out that high rates are common in Iraq however. Perhaps they are thrilled that someone is interested in their opinion.

Johnny Heald of Opinion Research Business gave a paper at the 2006 ESOMAR conference (ESOMAR is a world marketing organization) about his company’s polling experience in Iraq where they’ve done over 150 polls since the invasion. Typically they get response rates higher than 90% and in some cases everybody they asked, agreed to be interviewed.

Probably in cemeteries buried by their families or friends. According to one of the authors of the study the Iraqi Ministry of Health is only reporting 10% of deaths due to natural causes. Doesn’t inspire confidence in their ability to count violent deaths.

If the Iraqi government hadn’t decided to stop reporting civilian casualties to the United Nations, we might be able to get a more accurate count. In the meantime, the Hopkins study is the best information we have. I am afraid the Iraqis have learned all too well from this administration that hiding facts is easier than dealing with them.

With amazement I am reading all these comments mostly made by so called ‘right wing’ people. And these people who often cannot tell the difference between the average and the median instantly know that this Lancet report is flawed.

Well I am a skilled statistican from Holland and for example I have given advice at the Dutch authorities about how to measure dioxine levels in milk, or more precise: what statistical procedure to follow.

I have read the Lancet report and I can find no fault in methodology or in outcome. I wish the reported outcome of 650k extra dead would be lower but it has to be remarked that this is a lumpsum number.

By the way: It is easy to check if indeed the mortality rate has doubled or tripled: Just visit a few Iraqi cementaries and see if the rows of freshly dugged graves is indeed twice or three times the length of dugged graves/year from the Saddam era.

Why do I write this post? Well I would like to give the so called ‘right wing’ people a gift. A gift? Yes a gift. Here we go:

For the last 3.5 years every now and then I declare it to be a so called Military Bloody Day and very often US military death toll on such days is written with a double digit number. My reader can check for him or herself, the latest Military Bloody Day was located at 02 October or 09 Ramadan. We had 09 killed US slime in Iraq and 02 in Afghanistan, since 09 + 02 = 11 we had one more day of double digit fun…;)

Now please don’t get mad my dear reader, your military likes me a lot because every now and then I give them some advice for use on the battlefield. Just like I give advices to al Qaida in whatever country and until now the US military has never complained about my double digit jokes.

I only use my right of free speech and every idiot in the Western world is allowed to declare so called Military Bloody Days while reciting for civil death toll is often forbidden. So I do nothing illegal or so my dear reader, but I just like it so much: Double digit US military death toll is what I desire with all of my heart and who knows may be in some far future I can hope for triple digit fun on certain specified days…

Now this was my gift for the rednecks and the right wingers. (The lefties in the USA must not think that I favor them or so; they are Americans and therefore are stupid by definition. Just by definition.)

First, let me clarify that you’re dealing with two different Sams, so I’ll call myself Sam2. I wrote just one post about the need to see the data in more detail, not the personal comment about you.

I think your abusive response was triggered by the other Sam’s sarcasm, but it deserves a response to the part about my post. I can assure you that I read the Burnham study very carefully in its entirety. I found Figure 2 disconcerting. It is a colored map of Iraq and its governorates, with the colors specifying the rates of violent death per 1000 population per year, in three categories: low (<2), medium (2-10), and high (>10). It was impossible to determine from this what the actual breakdown was. To add up to 600,000 violent deaths, it could have been (for [ low: medium: high], based on the respective populations in Table 1) [50,000: 370,000: 180,000], or it could have been [0: 80,000: 520,000]. The latter extreme would say that nearly all the violence was in Anbar, Ninewa, Salah-al-Din, and Diyala provinces – a very different picture from the former extreme. I suspect that the real data may be closer to the latter than the former, and there might be outliers like the Fallujah cluster of 2004 fame. That’s why it would be useful to see the details.

I think the authors may themselves be a bit nervous about their results, and might look for ways to weasel out of sharing their data, despite their obligation to do so, even if they don’t intend to falsify it. Here’s an excerpt from an article on the controversy in the latest issue of Science:

“Neil Johnson and Sean Gourley, physicists at Oxford University in the U.K. who have been analyzing Iraqi casualty data for a separate study, also question whether the sample is representative. The paper indicates that the survey team avoided small back alleys for safety reasons. But this could bias the data because deaths from car bombs, street-market explosions, and shootings from vehicles should be more likely on larger streets, says Johnson. Burnham counters that such streets were included and that the methods section of the published paper is oversimplified. He also told Science that he does not know exactly how the Iraqi team conducted its survey; the details about neighborhoods surveyed were destroyed “in case they fell into the wrong hands and could increase the risks to residents.” These explanations have infuriated the study’s critics. Michael Spagat, an economist at Royal Holloway, University of London, who specializes in civil conflicts, says the scientific community should call for an in-depth investigation into the researchers’ procedures. “It is almost a crime to let it go unchallenged,” adds Johnson.”

So you see they are already changing their story, saying that the actual methods were not as described in the paper, and that they don’t even have a record of some of the details I wanted to see (eg, was one of their random “main streets” the main drag of Fallujah?). I think that a certain amount of healthy skepticism is justified. It is gratifying to see that the scientific community is indeed starting to clamor for details.

By the way, if I had never read any scientific study in my life, how would I know that many current papers include online supplementary data?

The second paragraph of my last post came out garbled (seemingly because of “greater than” and “less than” symbols confusing the computer), so I’m posting it again:

I can assure you that I read the Burnham study very carefully in its entirety. I found Figure 2 disconcerting. It is a colored map of Iraq and its governorates, with the colors specifying the rates of violent death per 1000 population per year, in three categories: low (less than 2), medium (2-10), and high (more than 10). It was impossible to determine from this what the actual breakdown was. To add up to 600,000 violent deaths, it could have been (for [ low: medium: high], based on the respective populations in Table 1) [50,000: 370,000: 180,000], or it could have been [0: 80,000: 520,000]. The latter extreme would say that nearly all the violence was in Anbar, Ninewa, Salah-al-Din, and Diyala provinces – a very different picture from the former extreme. I suspect that the real data may be closer to the latter than the former, and there might be outliers like the Fallujah cluster of 2004 fame. That’s why it would be useful to see the details.

“It’s almost counterintuitive”, says Warren Joseph. I don’t get the “almost”. The whole problem here is that this study argues with people’s gut feelings; they can’t believe it’s that bad. People who understand epidemiology & statistics (a massively counterintuitive discipline) do not share their contempt.

If gut feelings didn’t lie, there would be no need for science. We would intuitively know the answer to any question we had a gut feeling about. If you don’t believe that your guts can lie, try flying an airplane in a big black cloud.

To compound our problems, gut feelings can be generated by past experience, social programming, etc.

A peer reviewed, scientific study is about as far as you can get from gut feelings, political or otherwise, & that’s a good thing. It’s what we pay those guys for.

Reinko you piss me off. I don’t support US hegemony in the interest of Wall Street. What pisses me off is you calling American dead slime. They are not slime but America’s poor, politically illiterate, brainwashed young men and women who can’t even spell democracy. Show some compassion you tulip head.

Tom W. wrote ” ……the number of deaths per 1000 people can be higher for developed nations than in less-developed countries, despite standards of health being better in developed countries. This is because developed countries have relatively more older people, who are more likely to die in a given year, so that the overall mortality rate can be higher even if the mortality rate at any given age is lower.

Jaybo:If you read my previous post, I call into question the validity of using sampling methodologies that medical/health professionals would use for the purpose of gathering data for violent deaths.

You do but you give no convincing reason. The statement about ‘mutually exclusive event’s’ is nonsensical. Cluster sampling methods are often used in disaster situations (hurricanes, earthquakes, wars, epidemics, etc). The fact that hurricanes and earthquakes are ‘mutually exclusive events’ has nothing to do with anything.

“Neil Johnson and Sean Gourley, physicists at Oxford University in the U.K. who have been analyzing Iraqi casualty data for a separate study, also question whether the sample is representative. The paper indicates that the survey team avoided small back alleys for safety reasons. But this could bias the data because deaths from car bombs, street-market explosions, and shootings from vehicles should be more likely on larger streets, says Johnson.”

I found it strange that Johnson and Gourley didn’t mention another bias which acts in the opposite direction, ‘residential street bias’. According to Burnham et. al., all interviews were restricted to residential street households. If main streets are indeed more dangerous then this would lead to a bias in the opposite direction and perhaps even lead to an overall underestimate of the number of deaths.

Hmmm…if it had not been for Sam2, who I guess had, like me, already posted as Sam, this would not have registered:

warren joseph :

To Sam –

Yep, you cite two lines out of 28 that I wrote as if that were my statement in its entirety. It seems that you’re intimidated by references to things like academic credentials and intelligence, which, I’m guessing, probably has something to do with your own insecurities about your appalling lack of such things.

The rest of your post was obviously intended for Sam 2.

As for the part directed at me: No, I was ridiculing you and your premise and, for your entire post, which was a paen to the study people and how wonderful they are because of who they are – argument from creditials and authority, without directing any comments to the substance of any criticisms of their study.

Your “substantive” argument was: we medical students at Johns Hopkins are so really very very very smart, anybody that believes other than we do is stupid, and if you don’t believe we are so very very smart, here are our SAT and MCAT scores.

Where I come from, even really really smart people can make really really stupid mistakes, in their fields of expertise, and simple mistakes at that. And credentials do not mean those experts do not make stupid mistakes.

I might be intimidated by intelligence, but test scores are no indication of an intelligence worth being intimidated by.

If you look at worldwide data on mortality vs. life expectancy, you will see a clear tendency for nations with higher mortality rates to have lower life expectancies, and vice versa.

That’s true, but it is also not quite the same issue as

the number of deaths per 1000 people can be higher for developed nations than in less-developed countries, despite standards of health being better in developed countries. This is because developed countries have relatively more older people, who are more likely to die in a given year, so that the overall mortality rate can be higher even if the mortality rate at any given age is lower.

Tom W,
I will post the info you seem to need in order to clarify my point.

You should read it.

“The cluster sampling critique”

“There are shreds of this in the Kaplan article, but it reached its fullest and most widely-cited form in a version by Shannon Love on the Chicago Boyz website. The idea here is that the cluster sampling methodology used by the Lancet team (for reasons of economy, and of reducing the very significant personal risks for the field team) reduces the power of the statistical tests and makes the results harder to interpret. It was backed up (wayyyyy down in comments threads) by people who had gained access to a textbook on survey design; most good textbooks on the subject do indeed suggest that it is not a good idea to use cluster sampling when one is trying to measure rare effects (like violent death) in a population which has been exposed to heterogeneous risks of those rare events (ie; some places were bombed a lot, some a little and some not at all).
There are two big problems with the cluster sampling critique, and I think that they are both so serious that this argument is now a true litmus test for hacks; anyone repeating it either does not understand what they are saying (in which case they shouldn’t be making the critique) or does understand cluster sampling and thus knows that the argument is fallacious. The problems are:
1)Although sampling textbooks warn against the cluster methodology in cases like this, they are very clear about the fact that the reason why it is risky is that it carries a very significant danger of underestimating the rare effects, not overestimating them. This can be seen with a simple intuitive illustration; imagine that you have been given the job of checking out a suspected minefield by throwing rocks into it.
This is roughly equivalent to cluster sampling a heterogeneous population; the dangerous bits are a fairly small proportion of the total field, and they’re clumped together (the mines). Furthermore, the stones that you’re throwing (your “clusters”) only sample a small bit of the field at a time. The larger each individual stone, the better, obviously, but equally obviously it’s the number of stones that you have that is really going to drive the precision of your estimate, not their size. So, let’s say that you chuck 33 stones into the field. There are three things that could happen:
a)By bad luck, all of your stones could land in the spaces between mines. This would cause you to conclude that the field was safer than it actually was.
b)By good luck, you could get a situation where most of your stones fell in the spaces between mines, but some of them hit mines. This would give you an estimate that was about right regarding the danger of the field.
c)By extraordinary chance, every single one of your stones (or a large proportion of them) might chance to hit mines, causing you to conclude that the field was much more dangerous than it actually was.
How likely is the third of these possibilities (analogous to an overestimate of the excess deaths) relative to the other two? Not very likely at all. Cluster sampling tends to underestimate rare effects, not overestimate them[2].
And 2), this problem, and other issues with cluster sampling (basically, it reduces your effective sample size to something closer to the number of clusters than the number of individuals sampled) are dealt with at length in the sampling literature. Cluster sampling ain’t ideal, but needs must and it is frequently used in bog-standard epidemiological surveys outside war zones. The effects of clustering on standard results of sampling theory are known, and there are standard pieces of software that can be used to adjust (widen) one’s confidence interval to take account of these design effects. The Lancet team used one of these procedures, which is why their confidence intervals are so wide (although, to repeat, not wide enough to include zero). I have not seen anybody making the clustering critique who as any argument at all from theory or data which might give a reason to believe that the normal procedures are wrong for use in this case. As Richard Garfield, one of the authors, said in a press interview, epidemics are often pretty heterogeneously distributed too.
There is a variant of this critique which is darkly hinted at by both Kaplan and Love, but neither of them appears to have the nerve to say it in so many words[3]. This would be the critique that there is something much nastier about the sample; that it is not a random sample, but is cherry-picked in some way. In order to believe this, if you have read the paper, you have to be prepared to accuse the authors of telling a disgusting barefaced lie, and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so. They picked the clusters by the use of random numbers selected from a GPS grid. In the few cases in which this was logistically difficult (read: insanely dangerous), they picked locations off a map and walked to the nearest household). There is no realistic way in which a critique of this sort can get off the ground; in any case, it affected only a small minority of clusters.”http://crookedtimber.org/2004/11/11/lancet-roundup-and-literature-review

Tom W said:
“According to Burnham et. al., all interviews were restricted to residential street households. If main streets are indeed more dangerous then this would lead to a bias in the opposite direction and perhaps even lead to an overall underestimate of the number of deaths.”

It depends on what a “main street” means. On a “main drag” you’d be less likely to find residences. The people planting IED’s or car bombs, or participating in attacks on military convoys passing through, or having “work accidents”, would likely be living on the nearby residential streets that were by definition (“crossing the main street”) singled out for the survey.

Sam2: It depends on what a “main street” means. On a “main drag” you’d be less likely to find residences.

Yes but that doesn’t change the fact that ignoring those residences produces a bias.

sam2:The people planting IED’s or car bombs, or participating in attacks on military convoys passing through, or having “work accidents”, would likely be living on the nearby residential streets that were by definition (“crossing the main street”) singled out for the survey.

Where the insurgents live is not particularly relevant as I doubt they set IED’s off next to their own houses.

Also choosing a house on a cross street, as was done in the study, does not necessarily mean it is ‘nearby’. It could be miles away.

I’m familiar with that piece jaybo. Had you read it more closely you would have realized that it is a DEFENSE of cluster sampling. I guess you got confused by the fact that he begins by describing the critiques before demolishing them

Also had you read a little further along you would have found

The bottom line is that the Lancet study was a good piece of science, and anyone who says otherwise is lying

I could have gone on Wikipedia and edited their entry on Mortality to prove the point that anyone can write anything in Wikipedia…

Any erroneous changes you made would probably be quickly be removed.

Wikipedia certainly isn’t the final word but it is an excellent source of ‘potential facts’ which then can be verified with the aid of more solid sources.

If you look at worldwide data on mortality vs. life expectancy, you will see a clear tendency for nations with higher mortality rates to have lower life expectancies, and vice versa.If you look at worldwide data on mortality vs. life expectancy, you will see a clear tendency for nations with higher mortality rates to have lower life expectancies, and vice versa.</i?

I see no such thing. Among the 20 countries with the lowest mortality rates we find Gaza, the West Bank. Oman, Libya, Jordan, Nicaragua, Ecuador…hardly countries with high life expectancies. In fact there are only two countries that appear in both the 20 countries with the highest life expectancies and the 20 with the lowest mortality rates…Singapore and Macau.

It would if the density of residences (normalized to average) times the density of deaths (normalized) is bigger than one. A main drag would more likely have stores, market places, police stations, targets. But as you say, people are not going to set off IED’s next to their own houses. If I was running the insurgency, I would look for operatives who live in the neighborhood, who know the place and can case the targets, and can slink off back home, a couple of blocks away.

It could be miles away.

True, but if they conveniently destroyed that information, there’s no way of checking it. A residential street that’s miles long? Doesn’t sound typical to me.

Bottom line: You just have to see the actual data. There’s plenty of reason for skepticism.

The authors of the report allowed for a huge margin of error, which is why they made no hard & fast claim for the 655,000 figure – they only said it was the most probable betwee a minimum of 392,976 & a maximum of 942,636.

Has anybody commenting ever seen an Iraqi death certificate? Google one up in Google’s images search. It is a document that does not appear, at first glance, to be very fraud proof. The Lancet study group was known. If they were penetrated, death certificates could have been forged. It wouldn’t take more than one guy on the inside of the Lancet group and a few people who worked in the appropriate ministry to get the appropriate forms/stamps.

Manipulating this study would be *easy* and not detectable unless you verify the data.

“According to Burnham et. al., all interviews were restricted to residential street households. If main streets are indeed more dangerous then this would lead to a bias in the opposite direction and perhaps even lead to an overall underestimate of the number of deaths.”

It depends on what a “main street” means. On a “main drag” you’d be less likely to find residences. The people planting IED’s or car bombs, or participating in attacks on military convoys passing through, or having “work accidents”, would likely be living on the nearby residential streets that were by definition (“crossing the main street”) singled out for the survey.

What am I missing? Aren’t most of the reports of bombings in markets, on main commercial streets, near police stations, by lines for whatever?

That seems to be the criterion for the contribution from main street households to dominate but even when they don’t dominate the bias can be as large as 100%.

That depends on the parameters. If the population living on main streets is only 1% of the total population, then if the rate of death there is as much as 20-fold higher than for the whole population, you’d still only underestimate the total deaths by 20% by ignoring the main street deaths.

Sam said:

What am I missing? Aren’t most of the reports of bombings in markets, on main commercial streets, near police stations, by lines for whatever?

Yes, and the victims would likely have their homes mostly on residential streets in the neighborhood, and would therefore be detected in the survey.